



i R aecandn CHRISTIANITY. 
ts 














WAYS OF THE SPIRIT, 


And Cther Cssaps. 


BY 


FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE, 


AUTHOR OF “REASON IN RELIGION,” “ PRIMEVAL WORLD OF HEBREW 
TRADITION,” ETC. 


BOSTON: 
AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION. 


IgOl. 











Beis tac Se ee 
Copyright, 
By Roserts BROTHERS, 
1877. 








Cambridge: 
Press of Fohn Wilson and Son. 


XI. 


ING 


CONTENTS. 


pian VW ASA OF HUSH ORS a ie) veil eile: yell 
Pre WAS ORMRELIGION, | a.) <)/ cul els cali. 
Tue WaAy or Historic CHRISTIANITY . . 
THe Way oF Historic ATONEMENT . 

Toe Naturau History or THEISM 
CRITIQUE OF PRooFs OF THE BEING oF GOD 
ON THE ORIGIN OF THINGS . . 


Tuer Gop or RELIGION, OR THE HumMAN Gop 


DUALISM AND OPTIMISM .... . 
IEFANIR EDICTS Mine: ermal’ veo ict Maken lade otinel apes 
tm WORE EIGIONS + shes i sie 


Tue MytuicaLt ELEMENT IN THE NEw TEs- 
TAMENT 
INCARNATION AND TRANSUBSTANTIATION . 


tee EHoOWAN SOU . ss 6. 














I, 


THE WAY OF HISTORY. 


PEP SToRy, in the sense of a systematic survey 

of the progress of society, based on the 
_ principle of a necessary order of human develop- 
ment, is emphatically a modern science. The 
ancients had no history in this sense of the term, 
no “universal” history as distinguished from the 
history of single nations. They recounted the 
acts or described the fortunes of tribes and states, 
but had nothing to say of the human family. 
They knew no human family. They knew only 
Greeks and Barbarians, Romans and Outsiders 
(extert), Jews and Gentiles. Polybius, indeed, 
called his history Ka@od«7 — universal — but only 
as comprehending in its survey of Roman affairs 
some account of the nations with which Rome came 
in contact. His starting point is Rome, not man. 
No classic historiographer, from Herodotus to 


Herodian, has attempted a history of man. 
a : 


a one al 


= 


2 THE WAY OF HISTORY. 


In one remarkable instance, however, the idea 
of such a history, and with it, of a human family, 
is distinctly recognized. In the Biblical Book of 
Genesis we have the beginning of a history of man, 
but one which stops short with the mythic age of 
the world. Biblical history brings man to the 
building of Babel, or the period of greatest con- 
centration, succeeded by disruption and dispersion ; 
and then, dismissing the theme, confines itself to 
the single Hebrew line. Brief and fragmentary as 
the narrative is, these first chapters of the Bible 
contain more important contributions to the sci- 
ence of history than all the classics. 

Christianity, by intoning the brotherhood of man, 
awakened a new interest in human destiny. The 
Christian Fathers manifest a truer appreciation of 
the unity of the race. Bunsen calls Clement of 
Alexandria “ the first Christian philosopher of the 
history of mankind.” St. Augustine’s “City of 
God” embraces in its scope the whole human race 
as the subject of divine education, and distributes 
the ages of man in six days of a thousand years 
each, to end with the millennium. 

Of the historiographers of the Middle Age the 
Western are simply chroniclers ;! and the Byzan- 


1 Such are Eginhard, Paulus Diaconus, William of Malmes- 
bury, Gregory of Tours, Albert of Aix, William of Tyre, Geoffroy 
de Villehardouin, Froissart, and Matthew Paris. 


THE WAY OF HISTORY. 3 


tines — immensely important in their line —con- 
fine themselves, with one or two exceptions,! to 
the Lower Empire. 

With the impulse given to the human mind by 
the stirring events of the fifteenth and sixteenth 
centuries, this branch of science blossoms into new 
significance. The astounding discoveries of the 
great navigators who solved the “ocean secret,” 
and lifted the veil from what till then had been 
considered the night-side of the globe ; the enlarged 
geographic and ethnographic views, and the wider 
survey of human kind resulting from these dis- 
coveries, combining with the recent “ Revival of 
Letters ” and the Saxon Reformation of the Church, 
—gave to history not only a new impulse but a 
new direction. No longer partial, local, it becomes 
encyclopedic, cosmopolitan. The writers of his- 
tory task themselves with new and higher aims, 
evincing a new-born consciousness of unity and 
integrity pervading all the epochs and all the races 
and generations of man. The study of history 
becomes academic, and Torsellino’s “ Epitome 
Historiarum” is used as a text-book in the uni- 
versities of Europe. 


1 Zonaras wrote a “ History of the World;” Glycas, a “ His- 
tory of the World from the Creation to the Death of Alexius 
Comnenus;” Zosimus, a “History of the Roman Empire from 
Augustus to Honorius.” 


4 THE WAY OF HISTORY. 


It was not, however, until after the lapse of an- 
other century, that the fundamental principle of 
all history was adequately stated. It was not till 
then that the discovery was made of a science of 
history. For this science we are indebted to Italy. 
The country which unlocked the New World was 
the first to suggest the true interpretation of the 
annals of the Old. John Baptist Vico, a native of 
Naples, published in 1725 his “Scienza Nuova,” or 
“ Principles of a New Science relative to the Com- 
mon Nature of Nations.” This work contains the 
germ of many of the speculations of subsequent 
philosophies of history; but its principal merit 
consists in its clear and emphatic assertion of the 
principle of divine necessity, — that is, of a natural 
law in historic processes and revolutions. Vico 
was the first to point out distinctly the analogies 
and parallelisms in the history of nations, and to 
show that the progress of society follows a given 
order; that nations have their necessary, preap- 
pointed course of evolution and revolution; that 
human history, in short, no less than the material 
universe, is governed by fixed laws: consequently 
that history is a science, or that a science of history 
is possible. “It is found,” says Michelet, in his 
essay on the New Science, ‘“‘ that nations the most 
remote in time and space follow in their political 
revolutions and in those of their languages a 


THE WAY OF HISTORY. 5 


strikingly analogous course.” “To disengage the 
regular from the accidental ; to trace the universal, 
eternal history which develops itself in time in the 
form of particular histories ; to describe the ideal 
circle within which the real world revolves, — this 
is the aim of the new science. It is at once the 
philosophy and the history of humanity.” 

From an examination of the languages, laws, and 
religions of different peoples, and a survey of the 
course of events in the principal nations, Vico 
deduces these positions: I. Human society is 
based on three fundamental conditions, — worship, 
or the belief in Divine Providence; marriage, or 
the restraint of the passions; sepultural rites, or 
the belief in immortality. These are what Tacitus 
calls feedera generis humani. II. Society has three 
great periods, —the theocratic, the heroic, and the 
humane. III. The civil and political life of na- 
tions, so long as they preserve their independence, 
assumes successively four different forms of gov- 
ernment. The theocratic age produces domestic 
monarchy (patriarchism). The heroic produces 
aristocracy, or the government of the city, limit- 
ing the abuse of power. Then comes democracy, 
founded on the idea of natural equality. And 
lastly despotism, or imperial rule, establishes itself 
on the ruins of democracy, and puts an end to 
the anarchy and public corruption to which popu- 


6 THE WAY OF HISTORY. 


lar governments give rise. Or, if that remedy 
fails, the degenerate nation, given over to anarchy 
and corruption, becomes the prey of the spoiler, 
and succumbs to a foreign yoke. IV. When a 
nation or when society has passed through these 
stages, and unreclaimed by the revolutions it has 
experienced still continues to decline and degen- 
erate, it passes at last into a second barbarism. 
Faith expires, religion languishes, men grow brutal, 
cities decay, society becomes effete and lies supine 
until regenerated by some providential impulse 
from without. Then the cycle of history begins 
anew, and humanity repeats with new auspices its 
appointed course. V. From the facts thus ob- 
served, from the indications of law and a regular 
succession in human events, Vico derives the idea 
of a great city of nations, whose founder and 
governor is God, —a republic of the universe, the 
miracle of whose constitution is, that through all 
its revolutions it finds in the very corruptions of 
each preceding state the elements of a new and 
better birth. 

Since the publication of the “Scienza Nuova,” 
the philosophy of history has found no end of 
expositors. Among the numerous works in this 
department, Montesquieu’s “Esprit des Loix,” 
Ferguson’s “Civil Society,” Lessing’s little trea- 
tise, ‘The Education of the Human Race,” Her- 


THE WAY OF HISTORY. 7 


der’s “ Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der 
Menschheit,” Kant’s “Zur Philosophie der Ge- 
schichte,’ Fichte’s “ Grundziige des gegenwirtigen 
Zeitalters,” the chapters relating to the progress of 
human society in Comte’s ‘‘ Cours de Philosophie 
Positive,” Krause’s and Hegel’s “ Philosophie der 
Geschichte,” deserve especial mention. I am 
speaking of the philosophy of history in the nar- 
rowest sense, not of historic criticism or historic 
art; else would a host of names of equal and 
even graver note demand to be noticed in this 
connection. 

It is now understood that history has its laws, 
as well as astronomy ; that the course of events is 
a necessary, not a fortuitous, succession, and the 
march of humanity through the nations and 
through the ages a series of progressive develop- 
ments. The supposition is fundamental to the 
study of history as a science. If the course of 
events and the destiny of nations were governed 
by no law and subject to no method, there could 
be no science of history, but only chronicles, regis- 
tries of facts unreferred to any principle or ruling 
idea, incapable of classification. The study of 
history in that case wonld be useless, because it 
would lead to nothing. The end of all study is 
the discovery of law; that is, of spirit, that is, of 
Deity in the facts studied. If in any class of facts 


8 THE WAY OF HISTORY. 


no law were discoverable, the knowledge of those 
facts would be hardly worth the labor spent in 
acquiring it. We read history to little purpose, 
if we read it only as a record of facts, and see in 
it no demonstration of Divine method. The facts 
themselves are not truly apprehended, unless we 
see them in the light of some principle or law 
which they illustrate. Take the battle of Actium, 
in Roman history. I read that the forces of Octa- 
vius met those of Antonius in the Ambracian Gulf, 
and obtained a signal victory over them. What 
signifies that fact to me? What do I know of 
Roman history, if all I gather from it is that 
Octavius was the better general or the luckier man 
of the two? The real fact has escaped me, if I 
fail to perceive its historic import. It was not 
valor nor luck, but historic necessity that tri- 
umphed in that encounter. It was necessary that 
democracy should replace an aristocratic oligarchy, 
like that of republican Rome. It was necessary 
that democratic anarchy should be replaced by an 
imperial head. Octavius represents in that con- 
flict the Latin or popular element in Roman his- 
tory. Antonius represents the Sabine or patri- 
cian. The internal history of the Roman Republic, 
and especially that of the previous century, had 
been a conflict of these two elements, the former 
seeking to disengage itself from the latter. The 


THE WAY OF HISTORY. 9 


battle of Actium was the consummation of that 
struggle. With the triumph of Octavius, — qui 
cuncta discordiis civilibus fessa nomine principis 
sub imperium accepit,1— democracy came to a head, 
Latin civility came to maturity, and in its turn 
became the matrix of its successor in empire, — 
the Christian Church. 

An objection may be raised against the doctrine 
of historic necessity, on the score of human free 
will. The conduct of history lies in the hands of 
human free agents. A glance at the course of 
events shows us that those revolutions which have 
furnished the materials and given the direction to 
history have been the work of individuals follow- 
ing the impulse of their own wills. How, then, 
can we affirm them to be the operation of a law, or 
how can history conducted by free will be a neces- 
sary process? If one looks at the matter a priori, 
it seems @ priort improbable that the destinies of 
humanity should be committed to individual ca- 
price, or that able and designing men should shape 
the world according to their whim. But what is 
the fact? Free agency acts under given condi- 
tions, and those conditions are contained in the 
natural order of things. There is no more escape 
from that order in the moral world than in the 
physical. All the motions on the earth’s surface, 


1 Tacitus. 


10 THE WAY OF HISTORY. 


however arbitrary and contrary one to another, 
obey the parent motion of the earth, and are swept 
along in the spheral march. So all possible move- 
ments of the human will are comprehended in the 
providential sweep of the parent will which works 
in each. The contradiction between freedom and 
necessity, so perplexing in the sphere of private 
life, disappears in the large dynamie of history. 
There, freedom and necessity are seen to be differ- 
ent factors of one movement,—freedom the hu- 
man, necessity the divine. The highest freedom 
is the strongest necessity, as in chemistry those 
affinities which are termed elective are precisely 
the most determined. Says Kant: ‘“ Whatever 
notion, in a metaphysical point of view, we may 
form to ourselves of the freedom of the will, its 
manifestation, —7. e. human actions, — like every 
other natural event, is determined by general laws 
of Nature.” } 

To the eye of sense ‘‘the river windeth at its 
own sweet will,” but reflection knows that the val- 
ley through which it winds has been scooped by 
the action of unchangeable laws; and in human 
life all freedom that succeeds is free occupation of 
appointed paths. The course of destiny is the 
providential channel in which human freedom 


1 Zur Philosophie der Geschichte ; Idee zu einer Allgemeinen 
Geschichte in Weltbiirgerlichen Absicht. 


>» Se, 
me 


THE WAY OF HISTORY. if 


elects torun. Accordingly, the great men of his- 
tory — the history-makers — are the “ providential 
men ;” they are those, in the language of Hegel,! 
‘“‘ whose private purposes contain the substance of 
that which is willed by the spirit of the world.” 
They may not be aware of their providential func- 
tion; they may not contemplate all the results 
they are used to effect; the ulterior consequences 
of their free action may not come within the scope 
of their design ;— the consequences follow none 
the less. Leo the Isaurian issues an edict pro- 
hibiting the use of images and pictures in the 
churches ; Pope Gregory repudiates the edict, and 
resists its execution in the West. What follows? 
While Emperor and Pontiff quarrel among them- 
selves, the empire splits between them; a goodly 
fraction comes off in Gregory’s hands. Following 
the bent of his own will in his own ecclesiastical 
affairs, that prelate becomes the providential means 
of sundering East and West, never to be united 
again. Rolf, from the coast of Norway, bent on 
plunder, lands his pirates on the soil of France, 
and extorts from Charles the Simple a slice of his 
kingdom. Rolf has no prevision of a Norman 
landing on the coast of Sussex, and an Anglo-Nor- 
man kingdom, and an English House of Lords, all 
which the future drew from that raid of his, whose 


1 Philosophie der Geschichte. 


12 THE WAY OF HISTORY. 


providential import was to give to the finest of the 
Gothic races a worthy field for their development. 

Sometimes, however, the providential men — like 
Julius Cesar, Mohammed, Cromwell — have shown 
themselves conscious of that Divinity which shapes 
our ends, and subsidizes our free will in accom- 
plishing its designs. It was no affectation or puer- 
ile vanity which prompted the first Napoleon to 
call himself the “Child of Destiny,” but an irre- 
sistible conviction of a power behind him, whose 
minister he was in spite of himself. 

Assuming, then, as a settled truth, that the 
course of history is governed by natural laws, the 
question arises, How far are those laws discover- 
able and demonstrable by scientific investigation ? 
This is a question which only the future of scien- 
tific investigation can answer. The application of 
logic to history is yet too recent, history itself is 
too recent, to furnish a complete solution. All 
that we can thus far assert with any degree of 
confidence is, that enough of law is discoverable 
to constitute history a science; or that a science of 
history is possible. 

The subject of this science is Man. To distin- 
guish it from anthropology, let us say Man in So- 
ciety. To distinguish it from ethnology, let us say 
Man the subject of progressive development. We 
have then three distinct topics: Man, Society or 
the State, and Social Progress. 


THE WAY OF HISTORY. 18 


I. Man. To the catholic eye of history he is 
one. The science presupposes what all its discov- 
eries tend to demonstrate, — the unity of the hu- 
man race. We need not trouble ourselves with 
the question whether all men actually originated 
from one pair, or whether different portions of the 
globe have given birth to independent varieties of 
the animal man. Enough that man, as the subject 
of history, is one. The historic nations have de- 
scended from one original. If any of the races 
that inhabit the earth have a different origin, those 
races are not historic; they have no part in human 
destiny, and will finally disappear from the earth, 
or be absorbed by historic man. Man, as the sub- 
ject of history, is one. The nations that compose 
him have one geographical, probably one genea- 
logical, origin. 

Historic man, according to tradition, was born in 
Western Asia, precisely where speculative ethnol- 
ogy would place his origin. If we glance at a map 
of the world on Mercator’s projection, we shall find 
that the portion of the earth’s surface which lies 
between the thirtieth and fortieth degrees of north 
latitude, and between the fortieth and sixtieth of 
east longitude, is about the centre of the habitable 
globe. Here it is, or hereabout, that tradition 
first discovers man, on the banks of the Tigris and 
the Euphrates. From this natal centre we find 


14 THE WAY OF HISTORY. 


him radiating eastward and south-eastward to the 
borders of the Pacific and the Indian Ocean, west- 
ward and north-westward to the Mediterranean and 
the Atlantic. In later ages his course has been pre- 
vailingly westward, across the Atlantic into South 
and North America. And now having crossed 
the American continent, and reached the uttermost 
verge of the west, on the borders of that Pacific 
which long since bounded his eastern migration, he 
has “ come full circle” around the globe. 

The where being settled, the next question is, 
How did man begin his race? Civilized or savy- 
age, in rude ignorance or furnished with science 
and art? This has long been a point in debate 
between ethnologists and theologians. The latter 
have taught that man’s first estate was superior, 
not only in moral purity but also in intellectual 
illumination, to every subsequent age. Philoso- 
phy, on the contrary, maintains that the original 
state was a savage state, —such as we find it to 
this day in South Africa and New Zealand, — and 
that ages went by before the race attained to 
the knowledge and arts of civilized life. Happily, 
our subject is not burdened with the responsi- 
bility of this question. We have nothing to do 
with man prior to the period when history finds 
him ; that is, the earliest period marked by con- 
temporary or nearly contemporary records. The 


THE WAY OF HISTORY. 15 


existence of records implies civilization. The word 
“history,” it will be observed, has a twofold sense. 
We use it to denote the course of events, and we 
also use it to denote the record of those events, 
This double meaning, says Hegel, is not accidental. 
It shows that actual history and written history 
are nearly related and cannot exist independently 
the one of the other. History does not begin to be 
until it is written. A people has no history until 
it is sufficiently mature to record its life; until it 
arrives at that degree of self-consciousness which 
makes the recording of it inevitable. The intel- 
lectual life of the individual does not begin with 
the animal birth; it begins with the birth of con- 
sciousness. It dates from the period of reflection, 
from the time when the individual begins to act 
knowingly, accounting to himself for his action. 
History is the record of the intellectual life of 
society ; it begins with the self-consciousness of 
society. It dates from the time when man associ- 
ates in civil bonds under fixed and accepted laws , 
from the time when society becomes organized, 
with settled functions and mutual responsibilities. 
Whatever, then, may have been man’s primal 
state, when history first finds him he is civilized, 
skilled in arts, governed by laws, living in cities, 
worshipping in temples. Of the times antecedent 
to that state, with their confused struggles, history 


16 THE WAY OF HISTORY. 


knows nothing. The exploration of those unre- 
corded ages belongs to another province than that 
of the historian: it belongs to the province of 
archeology or fore-history. History is coeval with 
civility ; that is, with the formation of States. 

II. Accordingly, our next topic is the State. It 
is not with man absolute or man as such, but with 
man conditioned by social organizations, that the 
science of history is concerned. These organiza- 
tions — monarchical, republican, democratic, or 
despotic —are the stated conditions of man’s de- 
velopment, the ordained method by which he ac- 
complishes his moral destiny, by which especially 
he satisfies two pressing demands of his nature, — 
liberty and right. Liberty and right are both the 
product of civil organization ; 7. e. of the State. 

Of liberty the contrary opinion prevails. It is 
thought that liberty belongs to man in his “natu- 
ral state”’ as it is called, that is, in a savage state, 
and is lost or impaired by civilization ; that liberty 
is older than civil society ; that, being originally 
unlimited, when States were formed it was sur- 
rendered for the sake of the State. It has been 
affirmed, as a self-evident proposition, that man 
is “born free.” That means, man is born with 
a natural capacity for freedom, and, co-ordinate 
with the development of that capacity, has a natu- 
ral right to freedom. It can mean nothing more. 


THE WAY OF HISTORY. 17 


Rousseau, unconscious of self-contradiction, de- 
clares that man “is born free, but is everywhere 
found in bonds.” He should have said, Man was 
made to be free, but has nowhere realized that des- 
tination. But Rousseau meant something more. 
He meant that man possessed originally a freedom 
which he has lost by civilization. He and others 
have imagined a condition of humanity, a so-called 
‘state of nature,” in which man was freer, and in 
many respects more fortunate, than we find him in 
civil society. Since none of these theorists have 
informed us where in the present this state is to be 
found, nor furnished any proofs of its existence in 
time past, we are warranted in treating the notion 
as a fancy or a fiction. The term “natural,” ap- 
plied to any primitive condition of man, imaginary 
or real, to distinguish it from subsequent condi- 
tions, is a foolish limitation of nature, — equivalent 
to saying that the root of a plant is natural and 
the blossom not natural. Civilization is the prod- 
uct of human nature; it contains nothing that 
human nature does not contain, and cannot there- 
fore in any rational sense be considered as less a 
state of nature than that of the Camanches or New 
Zealanders. ‘If we are asked,” says Ferguson, 
“‘ where the state of nature is to be found, we may 
answer, it is here. And it matters not whether 


we are understood to speak in the island of Great 
2 


18 THE WAY OF HISTORY. 


Britain, or at the Cape of Good Hope, or the 
Straits of Magellan.” “If we admit that man is 
susceptible of improvement, and has in himself a 
principle of progression and a desire of perfection, 
it is improper to say that he has quitted the state 
of nature when he has begun to proceed, or that 
he finds a station for which he was not intended, 
while, like other animals, he only follows the dis- 
position and employs the powers that Nature has 
given.” “If Nature is opposed to art, in what situ- 
ation of the human race are the footsteps of art 
unknown?” 

The notion that primitive man is freer than civil- 
ized man is an error which springs from not dis- 
tinguishing between liberty and caprice. We may 
dream of a state which combines what is best in 
civilization with all that is charming in aboriginal 
nature; but reality knows nothing of the kind. 
Reality knows only the civilized man and the say- 
age; and the question is, Which is the freer of the 
two? Superficial observation may decide in favor 
of the savage, but closer inspection will change 
that decision. The savage is less bound by con- 
ventions, but is bound in other ways. He is more 
the slave of his passions, more dependent on occa- 
sion, more fettered by necessity, less master of 


1 Essay on the History of Civil Society. 


THE WAY OF HISTORY. 19 


himself and the world, and therefore less free 
than the civilized. With less of law, he experi- 
ences greater limitation. The nearer we come to 
savage life, the more we find in it of tyranny and 
violence, of the bondage of passion and caprice. 
The nearer we come to it, the more we find the 
condition of the savage to be one of thraldom and 
restraint; the more we find him bounded and 
bound. Ferguson, with one word, refutes Rous- 
seau’s fancy of savage liberty, when he says, “ No 
person is free where any person is suffered to do 
wrong with impunity;” and Hegel, who defines 
liberty to be “the spirit’s realization of its own 
nature,” insists that, so far from being an accident 
of primitive man, it is something which must be 
wrought out, achieved, by a perpetual ‘“‘ mediation 
- between knowledge and will.” Right and moral- 
ity are its indispensable constituents. It is true, 
society as such imposes restraints, but the neces- 
sary restraints imposed by society are merely limi- 
tations of individual caprice which hampers liberty: 
they promote that emancipation of the will in 
which true freedom consists.1_ The notion of an 
antecedent natural liberty surrendered to society, 
and of social contracts requiring such surrender, is 
a pure fiction. Liberty is not an original but an 


” 


1 See Hegel’s ‘‘ Philosophie der Geschichte.” 


20 THE WAY OF HISTORY. 


acquired possession ; not an accident but a prod- 
uct, —the product of reflection, of legislation, of 
scientific adjustment; in a word, the product of 
the State. 

Likewise, the State is the parent and condition 
of morality. Morality as sentiment, disposition, 
faculty, is innate. Morality as fact is the prod- 
uct of law. Its earliest form — respect for others’ 
rights — originates with the institution of property. 
But property in its first beginnings provokes the 
worst passions of the human breast, occasions strife 
and shedding of blood. It has therefore been 
deemed unfriendly to morality, one of the evils 
which civilization has inflicted on mankind. “The 
first man,” says Rousseau, “who, having enclosed 
a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, 
‘ This is mine,’ and found people foolish enough to 
believe him, was the true founder of civil society. 
How many crimes, wars, murders, miseries, and 
horrors might have been spared to the human race, 
if some one at that juncture had pulled up the 
stakes or filled up the trenches, and had called to 
his fellow-men, ‘Beware how you listen to this 
impostor ; you are lost if you forget that the fruits 
of the ground belong to all, and that the earth is 
no man’s property!’” 1 





1 Rousseau, “ Sur lorigine de l’inegalité parmi les Hommes.” 


THE WAY OF HISTORY. 21 


But if property has been the occasion of strife 
and deeds of violence, it has also served to develop 
the idea of right in which all morality is founded ; 
and though some of the virtues—such as courage, 
fortitude, and patience — might certainly exist with- 
out it, most of the duties and most of the topics 
and occasions of moral discipline which society 
now furnishes would be wanting. Most of the 
duties of social life, as now constituted, are directly 
or indirectly connected with property. Rousseau 
himself confesses that the first rules of justice are 
derived thence. ‘For in order to render to each 
one his own,” he remarks, “it is necessary that 
each should own something.” 

Property begins with agriculture. To till the 
land it was necessary to enclose it. From tillage 
for the use of the tribe of land belonging to the 
tribe, — such as we still find at certain stages of 
savage life, —the transition was easy and natural 
to tillage for private use; the fruits and the land 
being both the property of the tiller. 

The relation of agriculture to civil law and the 
moral well-being of society was represented by the 
Greeks in the fable of Demeter, the mythical 
goddess of agriculture; who was called Oecpodopos, 
law-bringer. An ancient cameo represents her 
as accompanying Triptolemus, the planter, in his 
tour around the earth. She exhibits a scroll con- 


ae THE WAY OF HISTORY. 


taining a code of laws, while Triptolemus scatters 
wheat-seed. Hebrew tradition has embodied the 
same idea in the story of Cain, the first tiller of 
the ground ; who is also the first city-builder and 
eivilizer. - 

And not only by the institution of property 
which it authorizes and protects, and around which 
cluster so many motives and obligations to virtue, 
but also by establishing stricter relations between 
man and man; by civil jurisprudence making the 
moral sense of the wisest the rule for all ; and more 
especially by maintaining the sanctity of wedded 
life, — parent and nurse of domestic virtues, — 
the State develops the moral life of society. If 
then, and so far as, man has a moral calling to 
fulfil in this world, he belongs to the State and 
the State to him. States are at once the theme 
and the organ of history. 

III. Our next and last topic is Social Progress. 
Man is the subject of progressive development. 
The world’s history is not an aimless succession 
of events, —a heap of facts fanned together by the 
flight of time, as the wind piles sand-drifts in the 
desert, — but a process and a growth. The ages are 
genetically as well as chronologically related. The 
succession of events is rational; they follow each 
other by a necessary order, in such wise that one is 
the exponent of another, and all are moments of 


THE WAY OF HISTORY. 93 


one process. We say, then, that as civil society 
is the topic, so progress is the method, of history. 
In saying this we pronounce no judgment on the 
question of man’s perfectibility and final perfection. 
We assert nothing as to the ultimate destiny of 
the race, — whether the consummation of history 
is to be the perfection of society, according to the 
visions of the millennarians, or whether it is to be 
the utter dissolution of society by the action of 
some remediless evil. These are questions as to 
which history may aid us in forming an opinion, 
but which history thus far is incompetent to decide. 
But, surveying the past and present of society, we 
see such evidence of progress hitherto as warrants 
us in assuming — since some aim and purpose 
must be assumed to make history intelligible — that 
progress is that aim and purpose. We postulate 
progress as the key to history; as the mathemati- 
cian uses an hypothetical number in determining 
an unknown quantity. 

Progress in what and whitherward? Progress 
in liberty, answers Hegel, — progress first in the 
idea and then in the thing. This progress, accord- 
ing to him, has three stages, dividing the world’s 
history into three epochs, — the period of the 
Oriental nations, when only one was allowed to 
be free; the period of Greek and Roman civiliza- 
tion, when freedom was accorded to many; and 





94 THE WAY OF HISTORY. 


lastly, the period of the Germanic nations, when 
freedom is seen to be the rightful property of all. 
Instead of liberty, let us say progress in social 
organization, a more comprehensive interest of 
which liberty is one element among many: prog- 
ress in social union and toward a state in which 
that union shall be complete, in which nationali- 
ties shall no longer divide mankind, when the human 
family shall consciously unite in one organic whole, 
—a state combining the greatest freedom of the in- 
dividual with the greatest compactness of social 
union, and securing to all the members of tho 
common-weal the greatest possible advantage in 
their connection with each other. This desti- 
nation is at present strictly hypothetical: the 
immeasurable future alone can verify it. It is 
rendered probable, however, by the course of 
events thus far, of which it furnishes the most 
satisfactory solution. According to this view, every 
epoch of human history is a new stage of social 
development ; every state a fresh experiment in 
social organization ; and every historic revolution, 
exposing the inadequacy of each former state, 
inaugurates a new. 

The condition of all development is antagonism. 
Nothing grows without resistance, without oppo- 
sition of contrary elements. Society is no excep- 
tion to the universal law. There, too, is a perpetual 


THE WAY OF HISTORY. 25 


conflict of opposing forces, bursting often into open 
war. 

War is a normal crisis in human affairs, and 
must therefore occupy a large share in the world’s 
annals. Judged from the point-of-view of Chris- 
tian ethics, it presents solely the aspect of a moral 
evil, and incurs unreserved condemnation. So far 
as war is the product of individual volition and 
design, so far as it originates in or enkindles con- 
scious malevolent passion, it bears this character 
so distinctly and so appallingly, that the moral view 
becomes paramount and excludes every other. But 
war is not always, seldom indeed, on both sides the 
product of malevolent passions ; and the moral as- 
pect of war is not the only one to be considered. It 
has its objective, providential side, which demands 
the attention of the philosophic historian. The 
same divine Teacher who inculcated peace in his 
precepts, acknowledges the historic necessity of 
war, when he says, “ I am not come to send peace on 
earth, but a sword.” Wars differ widely in their 
moral character, according to the purposes of those 
who engage in them. There are wicked wars of 
vengeance and ambition, and there are also right- 
eous wars of self-defence. ‘There are idle wars of 
passion and caprice, and there are necessary wars 
of antagonist races, and conflicting ideas, princi- 
ples, religions. The Persian war to the Greeks 


26 THE WAY OF HISTORY. 


was a holy war,—a war of liberty, which decided 
the destiny of Hellenic civilization. On the other 
hand, the Peloponnesian war was an idle war of 
rivalry, which decided nothing, but proved finally 
ruinous to all the States engaged in it, and pre- 
pared the way for the downfall of Greece. The 
Thirty Years’ War, in the seventeenth century, was 
a necessary war of principles, which decided for 
the most intellectual portion of Europe the mo- 
mentous question of the right of private judgment. 
But the Seven Years’ War of the eighteenth cen- 
tury was a foolish war of princely ambition and 
princely spleen, which cost Europe over a million 
of lives, and secured to Austria, the aggressor in 
that conflict, none of the prizes for which she had 
contended. 

Besides this antagonism of contrary elements, 
the progress of society is further conditioned by a 
principle of alternation within itself which causes 
it to swing between opposite attractions, or to gyrate 
around them as around the foci of an ellipse, and 
which makes the development of humanity a series 
of revolutions instead of a uniform movement in 
one direction. Humanity gains something with 
each revolution; each lands society on a higher 
plane: and so the course of history becomes a 
spiral movement, at once revolutionary and pro- 
gressive. There is a periodicity in the alterna- 


THE WAY OF HISTORY. OF 


tions of society, a regular recurrence of the same 
phases, — which indicates a law whose action is 
calculable. 

An instance of this periodicity is the regular 
recurrence of periods of migration, which succeed 
each other at stated intervals in the world’s his- 
tory in conformity with a law of development in- 
herent in society. There never was an age when 
migration entirely ceased, but we may distinguish 
certain epochs in which it has proceeded with 
special activity; and these epochs we shall find 
to be the natural product of the social develop- 
ments which preceded them. The dispersion of 
the builders of Babel, in Biblical history, indicates 
the commencement of one of these periods of mi- 
gration, which seems to have been a necessary 
reaction on a period of immature concentration, 
when, in Biblical phrase, “ the whole earth was of 
one speech and one language,” and when a city 
intended to be a centre of consolidation for the 
human race was projected on the plain of Shinar. 
This migration may be supposed to have covered a 
period of five hundred years. The next occurs 
after an interval of five centuries, about two thou- 
sand years before the Christian era, and continues 
with intermissions and fluctuations, and different 
degrees of activity, for a thousand years. This 
great evolution, or series of evolutions, which colo- 


28 THE WAY OF HISTORY. 


nized Asia Minor, Phenicia, Palestine, Greece, 
Italy, and the Grecian Archipelago, appears to 
have been a reaction against the excessive spirit- 
ualism of the old Asiatic polities. It was followed 
by a thousand years in which the concentrative 
tendency again predominates, and migration, with 
occasional exceptions, ceases. Then, again, the 
excess of sensualism in Greek and Roman civiliza- 
tion encountered a reaction in Christianity, and 
Christianity required new races and new regions 
in and through which to develop its ideas. And 
now begins a new exodus from the North, by 
which Europe is flooded with the German and 
Scandinavian races, and which, with brief inter- 
ruptions, occupies another term of nearly a thou- 
sand years. The next five centuries are consumed 
in consolidating the European monarchies, some- 
times in antagonism, sometimes in harmony, but 
always within the bands of the Church of Rome. 
Then Church and State become oppressive; the 
human mind, new-quickened by the recently in- 
vented art of printing, reacts on ecclesiastical tra- 
dition, reacts on civil oppression, reacts on feudal 
privilege; a new-found continent invites adven- 
ture, and simultaneously with the Protestant Ref- 
ormation inaugurates the last of the migratory 
epochs now in progress. 

In accordance with this outline, instead of the 


THE WAY OF HISTORY. 29 


usual division of history into ancient, medieval, 
and modern, a more philosophic arrangement will 
distinguish four great periods,— the Asiatic (in- 
cluding the early African), the Greco-Roman, the 
Germanic, and the American. Of these, the first 
and the third may be subdivided into an earlier 
and later Asiatic and Germanic. 

Another example of periodicity in history is the 
alternation of the positive and negative forces of 
the mind, —imagination and reflection. The old 
Asiatic civilization discovers in every province of 
social life, and in all the action of the human mind, 
the predominance of imagination. Life is over- 
shadowed by huge superstitions ; all is prodigious, 
titanic, — colossal temples, colossal idols, in which 
the monstrous predominates over the beautiful 
and humane: everywhere mountainous theocracies 
piled upon poor humanity, absorbing and crystal- 
lizing its best juices. The institutions of society 
rise frowning and pitiless like stranded icebergs, 
while society itself, a scarcely perceptible stream, 
creeps lazily out from beneath. In secular or 
Japhetic history, the Persian war with the Greeks 
marks the boundary line of this era. When Then- 
istocles, by tampering with the priests at Delphi, 
could bend the oracle in accordance with his plans, 
the despotism of faith and fate had ceased for 
Greece. The secular element thenceforth asserts 


30 THE WAY OF HISTORY. 


itself in civil life. Reflection encounters Imagina- 
tion in the Gulf of Salamis, and puts a limit to his 
sway. There is no excess as yet of the former fac- 
ulty, but a happy equilibrium between the two. 
Then appeared that miracle of Greek and Roman 
culture which history is never weary of portraying. 
Then the world’s genius awoke, and lifted up the 
hands which had hung down, and opened the long 
silent ips. Then was the blossom time of art and 
song and philosophy and science; the age of the 
Parthenon, of the Apollo-Belvedere, of Sophocles 
and Plato ; followed, before its light had utterly gone 
out, by the age of Cicero and the first Cesar, and 
the great Augustan age of Latin civility and letters. 

But now the negative power acquires a dispro- 
portionate ascendancy ; imagination grows torpid, 
art and religion decline, materialism becomes ram- 
pant, all truth and reverence depart out of life. 
The poets of Alexandria employ themselves with 
shaping verses into eggs and axes. Lucian of 
Samosata has turned the Pantheon into a ceno- 
taph. Plutarch inquires “ why the oracles cease 
to give answers,” and a voice from the island of 
Paxos proclaims, ‘‘ Great Pan is dead!” 


“ Apollo from his shrine 
Can no more divine, 
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving, 
No nightly trance or breathed spell 
Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.” 


THE WAY OF HISTORY. 31 


The fire is gone out on the altar, the marble 
sleeps in the quarry. Come, Longobards and 
Franks, from the depths of the Odenwald and the 


Black Forest !— come, pour your fresh life into 
withered humanity; revive the perished world or 
bury it! 


The age of reflection ends, and a new era of 
despotic imagination begins: another long cycle 
wherein the huge and grotesque prevail over the 
beautiful and just. Again the portentous mis- 
growths of time. Farewell to letters and science 
and beautiful works of art! 

“Now entertain conjecture of a time 

When creeping murmur and the poring dark 

Fill the wide vessel of the universe.” 
The world’s stage is cleared for a new act of the 
great drama. The actors are harnessed warriors 
with closed visors, and scarlet priests. The old 
decorations — the storied friezes and Corinthian 
capitals — are replaced by the feudal castle, that, 
perched on a cliff at the angle of the river, seems a 
continuation of the rock itself, wrought by some 
freak of Nature into pinnacles and parapets. In 
the valley below, the symbol of penal torture is 
displayed in the cruciform church. The age of the 
Argonauts reappears in the crusades. Europe 
hurls herself upon Asia. The East and the West 
contend for the prize of the Holy Land. 


32 THE WAY OF HISTORY. 


Such was life in those centuries, — wild, mon- 
strous, extreme in devotion and in arms. 


“Der Ménch und die Nonne zergeisselten sich, 
Der eiserne Ritter turnierte.” 


Again there was a day when the empire of imag- 
ination received a check, and impassable limits 
were set to its sway. And this time the change 
was effected by the pen instead of the sword; 
and the agent was a German Professor of Phi- 
losophy. The birthday of the new era was the 
31st October, 1517, when Martin Luther nailed to 
the church at Wittenberg his ninety-five proposi- 
tions, which reinstated reason and conscience in 
their long-suppressed rights, opened an irreparable . 
breach between the Roman and the Saxon mind, 
and initiated the second age of reflection; which 
has not yet expired, and which comprises the great 
names of modern literature and science, from Gali- 
leo to Humboldt, from Shakspeare to Goethe. 


Such is the method of history. Progress by 
alternation, by conflict, by revolution, — always 
progress. These are the steps by which Humanity 
moves in its fore-ordained path, advancing, not 
simultaneously in all its faculties and members, 
but in one or another part for ever advancing. To 
what result and final consummation of its course 


THE WAY OF HISTORY. 33 


it is notin the Muse of History to predict, until, 
perhaps, some thousands of years have been added 
to her age, — 


“ And old Experience do attain 
To something of prophetic strain.” 


II. 
THE WAY OF RELIGION. 


ELIGION, in the broadest sense, is the life of 
the sentiments as contra-distinguished from 
that of the understanding, — of the sentiments 
turned from self, and directed to objects sought 
and cherished for their own sake, with no reflex 
view to private advantage. It is losing oneself 
in ideas, persons, things, which attract or command 
by their own intrinsic, or supposed intrinsic, worth. 
It is the heart’s response to the claims of beauty, 
duty, honor, man. All genuine enthusiasm ; all 
unselfish devotion, patriotism, philanthropy, art ; 
all self-sacrificing zeal, whatever its object, — par- 
takes of the nature of religion. Its essence is, — 
“Forget, forswear, disdain 
Thine own best hopes, thine utmost loss and gain, 
Until at last thou scarce rememberest now 
Tf on the earth be such a one as thou; 
Nor hast one thought of self-surrender —no ! 
For self is none remaining to forego.” 
In the narrower and technical sense, religion may 
be roughly defined as homage paid to surperhuman 
power. And this definition holds good, albeit re- 


THE WAY OF RELIGION. 30 


ligions exist in which the objects worshipped are 
not superhuman, but infra-human,—religions in 
which homage is paid to brute creatures and 
inanimate things. These objects are conceived 
as superhuman by the worshipper. When the 
Negro of South Africa prostrates himself before 
a block of wood, he confesses as sincerely a supe- 
rior to himself as the Parsee when he bends in 
adoration before the rising sun, as the Christian 
when he worships the invisible Lord. He has not 
yet learned the greatness that is in him, and is 
therefore ready to acknowledge in any creature a 
greater than himself. The eternal Mystery which 
all souls reverence looks out upon him from the 
senseless block ; and that is what he really adores. 
And that is what we also adore, more worthily 
conceived, but can we say more exactly under- 
stood? Must we not say, as incomprehensible to 
us as to him? 

The motive which prompts this homage is one 
of the primary forces of the soul. There is noth- 
ing more radical in man than religion; nothing 
more capable, more commanding. Stated or spas- 
modic, quiescent or flamboyant, in calm or storm, 
it builds by turns, and fires the world: in its pure- 
ness, the ornament and strength of society (decus 
et presidium nostrum) ; in its fall and perversion, 
the scandal and scourge of nations. Its scope is 


36 THE WAY OF RELIGION. 


the measure of history. It supplied the first 
rudiments of civil society; it forecasts the social 
destination of man. Wherever humanity is found 
at its highest, religion has been the motive-power, 
—leader in all progress; home-guard of all sta- 
bility ; source of revolutions the most prevailing ; 
champion and prize of the boldest adventures ; 
pioneer more eager than commerce; explorer more 
patient than science. Religion is acknowledged 
the mother of arts: she reared the temples that 
make Egypt venerable, and shaped the marbles 
that made Greece renowned. She lighted the eyes 
of the Sistine Virgin, and unrolled the “ Divina 
Commedia,” and inspired the strains of Handel 
and Bach. In private life she has been the au- 
thoritative teacher, comforter; lifting the soul 
above the dust, purifying the heart by faith, 
eliciting the spirit of self-sacrifice by which society 
subsists, cheering the sufferer in mortal pains, 
redeeming and renewing the world. 

While gratefully acknowlédging this multifold 
service of the great benefactress, we cannot forget 
the mischief and the woes that have often accom- 
panied these gifts and goods. We cannot forget 
that religion has been a worker of evil,—one of 
the greatest of the workers of evil. No agent 
that has wrought in earthly scenes has been more 
prolific of ruin and wrong. The wildest aberra- 


THE WAY OF RELIGION. 37 


tions of human nature, crimes the most portentous, 
the most desolating wars ; persecutions, hatred and 
wrath and bloodshed, more than have flowed from 
all sources beside, — have been its fruits. The yvic- 
tims of fanaticism outnumber those of every other 
and all other passions that have wasted the earth. 
Pining in dungeons, hunted like beasts of prey, 
stretched on the rack, affixed to the cross, — their 
sufferings are the horror of history. No high- 
wrought fiction, recounting imaginary woes, can 
match the colors of their authentic tragedy. A 
corruption of the text of the Vedas has cast thou- 
sands of Hindu widows alive on the funeral pile. 
An interpolation of two words in the service of 
the Eastern Church has driven whole villages in 
Russia into fiery death. A sentence in the Book 
of Exodus has been a death-sentence to millions 
of hapless women. And who shall compute the 
sum of the lives that have furnished the holocausts 
of the Inquisition ? 


“‘Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.” 


In this tale of sorrows we must reckon, more- 
over, the melancholy and madness religion so often 
engenders, — religious mania, which, where it does 
not impel to self-slaughter, oppresses the soul with 
dull despair, or pierces it with mortal anguish. 
It is fearful to think that man, in addition to the 


38 THE WAY OF RELIGION. 


necessary burdens of life and all inevitable ills, 
should be subject to these ideal woes; that so 
many fine spirits should suffer blight through their 
own diseased imaginations; that to so many noble 
minds the light that is in them should be made 
darkness through superstitious doubts and fears ; 
that so many innocent hearts should bear the 
burden of self-imputed guilt and doom! No region 
of the earth, and no plane of life, is secure from 
this plague. Bayard Taylor found in the track 
of the missionaries beyond the Arctic circle the 
same spiritual ails that have desolated polished 
lands. “The soul,” says Novalis, “is the most 
active of poisons.” Religion is the soul of mortal 
life: when mis-directed or over-urged it becomes, 
instead of an animating force, a consuming fire. 

Considering these harms, one is tempted to 
question if religion, on the whole, has been a 
blessing to mankind. To that question the an- 
swer must be sought in the infinite possibilities 
that lie in the idea of God, and the infinite dearth 
of spirit involved in the want of that idea, without 
which life would seem to be the sport of lawless 
power, — no reason in its origin, no meaning in its 
course, no hope in its end. Given that idea, all 
things desirable are possible. 

Meanwhile, our business at present is not with the 
moral but with the historical aspects of the subject. 


THE WAY OF RELIGION. 39 


The history of religion is the history of man; 
not of nations, but of man. The chronicles of 
nations, made up as they are of wars and revolu- 
tions, political formations and decays, dynasties 
and parties, institutions affecting the temporal and 
material well-being of their subjects, — these and 
the like of these, which figure so largely in the 
volumes of historiographers, are properly no part 
(or a very subordinate part) of the history of man. 
They are accidents, not substance; episodes, not 
method. The true history, the thread on which 
these are strung, is that progressive life of the 
spirit which binds the nations in one Providential 
order, and which alone gives meaning to man’s 
being in time. Without this, what we call history 
is a mere compilation of anecdotes, which may 
entertain the curious, but which leads to no ra- 
tional result. Reason demands, as the end and 
destination of man in society, a state in which the 
divine law shall organize itself in civil polity, and 
form the basis and determine the conduct of social 
life: in other words, a theocracy, or Kingdom of 
Heaven. 

Such being the end, the history of man must be 
viewed in relation to that end; so viewed, it as- 
sumes a sacred character. With all its contra- 
dictions and immoralities, which do but furnish 
the antagonism necessary to all development, the 


40 THE WAY OF RELIGION. 


history of man is the history of religion: the main 
epochs in the one are identical with those of the 
other. Accordingly, it is no one-sided or bigoted 
view of human things which has led Christian 
nations to date the world’s history with their 
religion. The chronology is true to the absolute 
fact as well as to Christian consciousness. Chris- 
tianity dates, because it determined, the course of 
time. The supreme moment in the ever-proceed- 
ing revelation of God, it became the confluence of 
the two main streams of civilization, —the Semitic 
and Japhetic. Uniting these, it forms the one 
river of modern history. Christendom is no pro- 
vincialism ; it is the world’s highway. 


In tracing the course of religious development, 
our first business is to ascertain the law and 
method by which that development proceeds. 
On this point theology and science are at variance. 
Where theology says “revelation,” science says 
‘law ;” and each supposes an antagonism between 
the two, as if one of these methods precluded 
the other. In the view of theology, the idea 
of a law of development militates with the sup- 
position of the present immediate action of the 
spirit of God. And, on the other hand, science 
mistrusts the term revelation, as seemingly opposed 
to that constant order which it loves to find in all 


THE WAY OF RELIGION. 41 


the succession of the ages of man. As usual in 
such controversies, both parties are right, and 
both are wrong. There is a law of development 
in the history of religion, and there is revelation. 
In the realm of spirit, as wellasin the kingdoms of 
unconscious Nature, God acts by law. His revela- 
tion of himself is not spasmodic, but methodical, 
continuous. Christianity, the highest instance of 
that revelation, is no episode, but a necessary part 
of the Divine method. The old way of treating the 
subject regarded Christianity as an afterthought 
of Deity, an amendment of the programme of 
Providence, necessitated by the miscarriage of for- 
mer methods, “an act supplementary to an act,” 
instead of the original design provided for in the 
constitution of things. The Mohammedan poet 
was nearer the truth: — 


“The world’s end and beginning are the same, 
And Jesus entered it when Adam came.” 


All such views of all such subjects are fast dis- 
appearing in the light of modern thought, which 
postulates law instead of arbitrary will as the funda- 
mental reason of things. Itis the business of science 
to trace that law; in all that exists to ascertain the 
normal principle by which it exists, and in virtue of 
which it could not be other than it is. Science 
knows nothing fortuitous and nothing arbitrary ; 
she finds necessity in the most exceptional as well as 


42 ' THE WAY OF RELIGION. 


the most stated ; ina shower of meteoric stones as 
well as the precession of the equinoxes; in spasms 
of wind and storm as well as the regular alterna- 
tion of the tides ; in the flaming aurora as well as 
the motions of the planetary system. In the very 
madness of nature and of nations she sees or divines 
an overruling method, and knows that the wildest . 
excesses of either must work in the traces of Om- 
nipotent order, — as the caracoling steeds in Gui- 
do’s great fresco are harnessed to the chariot of the 
constant sun, and lead the measured dance of the 
Hours. 

We express in one word the characteristic differ- 
ence between the ancient and the modern view of 
the universe, when we say Law. In every realm 
of human converse the scientific view has replaced 
the mythical. The world as viewed by the ancient 
mind was the product of caprice. Gods and demi- 
gods ruled it at will. Egyptian droughts were 
figured as the death of Osiris slain by the hand of 
Typhon. Returning fertility was ascribed to Horus, 
the immortal youth who conquers Typhon, — type 
of Nature’s rejuvenating power. The dispropor- 
tion of the lunar to the solar year was expressed 
by the threat of Sol to Rhea, that no month of 
the year should be allowed her for the birth of her 
child. The difficulty is adjusted by Hermes, who 
plays at dice with the Moon, and wins from her the 


THE WAY OF RELIGION. | 43 


five supplementary days with which the improved 
calendar eked out the three hundred and sixty of 
the original year. The term “Milky Way” in 
sidereal astronomy recalls the mythical explanation 
of the nebulous streak in the heavens so named ; 
the word “ voleano” suggests the stithies of Vul- 
can and the Lemnian fires. History was handled 
in the same fashion: demonic caprice was its 
motive power; its processes were the freaks of 
Divinity. The progress of civilization from Asia 
to Europe was conducted by Zeus, who crosses 
the Hellespont in the form of a bull bearing the 
daughter of Agenor or Canaan. Semitic culture 
conducted by conscious intelligence is Bunsen’s 
exposition of the myth. Where ancient philoso- 
phy allegorized, the modern intellect formulizes. 
Where the ancients saw will, the modern sees 
law, —law from whose dominion human agency is 
no more excluded than the kingdom of unconscious 
life. If there is any product of civilization which 
might be supposed to be irresponsible and acciden- 
tal, it islanguage. But language is shown by mod- 
ern glossologists to be subject to laws as inevitable 
as those which regulate all the processes of Nature. 
For this, too, is a process of Nature. It is nota 
human device, buta growth. The Roman Emperor 
might extend to whomsoever he pleased the right 
of citizenship, but he could not naturalize a vocable. 


44 THE WAY OF RELIGION. 


If, then, history and language are necessary pro- 
ducts, if the deeds and the speech of men in the 
gross are subject to law, it may be presumed that 
religion — the gravest and deepest of human con- 
cerns, the consummate product of humanity — is no 
exception to the general rule. We cannot suppose 
that the progress of religion, any more than the 
secular progress of human kind, is surrendered to 
accident ; that the mind acts less methodically in 
this than other manifestations; or that Destiny is” 
less concerned in this than in others. We must 
suppose a Providence in it; that is, a Providential 
education of the human race in religion, and an 
ordained method or necessary order by which it pro- 
ceeds. That necessary order, viewed on the human 
side, we term the law of religious development. 
That such a law exists as part of the reason of God, 
as a mode of the Divine wisdom, there can be no 
doubt; the only question is whether it is discover- 
able by man. Can it be ascertained by philo- 
sophic inquiry? Our answer to this question at 
present must be an empirical one; we cannot an- 
swer it dogmatically. We cannot assume to demon- 
strate the entire law of religious development; we 
can only indicate, as facts observed, or as inferences 
from them, some of the principles involved in it. 


I. In the first place, then, we observe three 


THE WAY OF RELIGION. 45 


stages of religion answering to the ages of human 
life: childhood, youth, maturity, — a period of the 
senses, one of sentiment, and one of ideas. Each 
of these stages has its own appropriate faith and 
worship ; and so we distinguish three fundamental 
forms of religion: realism, personism, and spirit- 
ualism,—the worship of things, the worship of 
persons, the worship of spirit. 

These stages are not sharply discriminated, but 
overlap one another like childhood and youth, or 
like youth and manhood, in the human individual. 
Accordingly, the several religions corresponding 
with them shade one into another by such nice 
gradations, and are so immixed in practice, that 
the lowest form of Nature-worship is not without 
some gleams of spiritual life, and the purest of 
historical religions is not without some taint of 
fetichism. All that can be fairly maintained is the 
prevalence of one or the other at different stages of 
human progress. There have even been cases of 
national religion in which the three forms co-existed, 
— asin Egypt under the Sesostrids, where the gross- 
est fetichism alternated with Osiris-cult in the prac- 
tice of the laity, while the finished epopt, under 
priestly training at Sais, was initiated in the truth 
of pure theism. 

Under the heads which have been named, there 
are several subdivisions and many distinct phases 


46 THE WAY OF RELIGION. 


of religious life. Realism includes fetishism, the 
worship of earthly creatures, and what is called 
“ Sabaism,” the worship of the heavenly bodies. 
Personism embraces the religions of Vedism, Brah- 
manism, Hellenism, and Odinism. Spiritualism 
comprehends the highest phases of all the revealed 
religions. 


II. The threefold division which graduates the 
religious progress of the human race repeats itself 
in particular dispensations. Most historical relig- 
ions have their sensuous, their sentimental, and 
their spiritual or spiritualizing period ;1 they ex- 
hibit phases of realism, personism, and spiritualism. 
Hither of these phases is more or less marked ac- 
cording to the general character of each religion, 
but in none are they wholly wanting. No religion 
is through all its periods entirely exempt from 
fetishism, and none is quite destitute of spiritual 
life. 

Take an example from Judaism. 

In the earlier history of the Hebrew people, 
before the establishment of the temple-worship, 


1 Not always indeed in the chronological order corresponding 
with childhood, youth, and manhood. The origin and earliest 
childhood of revealed religion is spiritual. Christianity especially 
had such an origin, and preserved fora time its spiritual childhood. 
But in its decline and subsequent revival, Christianity also exhibits 
the three phases above named. We note in it sacramental real- 
ism, idolatrous personism, and restored spirituality. 


THE WAY OF RELIGION. 47 


we read in the national Scriptures of a certain 
consecrated chest, or “Ark of the Covenant.” 
This structure was held to be the dwelling-place 
of Deity; it was borne in solemn procession on 
great occasions, and formed, with the associations 
and traditions attending it, the prominent feature 
of Israelitish worship. This institution the Tribes 
appear to have derived from the Egyptians, in 
whose religion kibotism, or ark-worship, was also 
a leading rite. We find traces of it in other an- 
cient nations. They seem to be in some cases 
reminiscences of the preservation of a human pair, 
by means of a box or rude craft, from the waters 
of adeluge. There are Greek medals representing 
a chest in which two individuals are floating on 
the water, with a dove and an olive-branch and 
a sacrifice supposed to be offered by the rescued 
pair after the subsidence of the waters. The ark 
on one of these medals bears the Greek name of 
Noah (Noe). Whether or not the service of the 
ark in the countries in which it was practised had 
this origin, it appears to have prevailed not only 
among civilized peoples, but also to some extent 
among barbarous tribes. Sir Joseph Banks, who 
accompanied Captain Cook in one of his voyages, 
found on an island of the Pacific a chest resembling 
the Ark of the Covenant as described in the Old 
Testament, with rings and poles for carrying it. 


48 THE WAY OF RELIGION. 


It was called by the islanders, “The House of 
God? 

Now the Ark of the Covenant was essentially 
fetish. It was supposed to be the medium of 
Divine power and blessing. When the Tribes 
crossed the Jordan, it was carried in advance, and 
miraculously divided the waters. It was borne in 
procession around the walls of Jericho, and caused 
their downfall. After temporary disuse, it was 
brought out again in the time of the Judges, on 
oceasion of an engagement with the Philistines. 
“ And the Philistines were afraid, for they said, 
God is come into the camp. Woe unto us! for 
there hath not been such a thing heretofore.” 
They rallied, however, and not only repulsed the 
Israelites, but even took the Ark of God, brought 
it to their city of Ashdod, and placed it in the 
Temple of Dagon. The consequence was that 
early on the morrow, *‘ Behold, Dagon was fallen 
on his face before the Ark of the Lord.” At the 
same time, and owing to the same cause, we are 
told that the city was visited with a sore epidemic. 
Altogether, the presence of the ark proved so dis- 
astrous that the Gentiles were fain to be rid of it; 
and after some consultation brought it to Kirjath- 
jearim, and deposited it in the house of Aminidab, 
where it lay for twenty years. When Dayid as- 
cended the throne, and established the seat of 


THE WAY OF RELIGION. 49 


government at Jerusalem, he undertook the re- 
moval of the ark to that city. The first attempt 
was unsuccessful, resulting in the death of the man 
employed in its transportation; whereat David 
was so disgusted that he abandoned the enterprise, 
until he learned that Obed-edom, in whose house 
the ark had been stored, was miraculously pros- 
pering through the influence of the charm. He 
then appointed a new commission, and the ark 
was brought into the city with great pomp, the 
king himself heading the procession with a dance, 
— which “excited some remark.” 

This is the last act of homage to the ark in 
Hebrew history. When Solomon’s Temple was 
completed, it was deposited in the Holy of Holies, 
where it thenceforth remained an obsolete sanctity. 
It perished with that temple, and that is the last 
we hear of it. So completely had it dropped from 
the use and consciousness of Jewish worship, that, 
when after the Captivity a new temple was insti- 
tuted, no attempt was made to restore it. Ark- 
worship had died out: a new phase of Judaism 
had succeeded. The presence of Jehovah had 
disengaged itself from the ‘ Mercy-seat between 
the Cherubim ” which surmounted that time-hon- 
ored box: it was no longer associated with any 
material thing. The devout imagination had out- 


grown that conception, and replaced it with the 
4 


50 THE WAY OF RELIGION. 


notion of a potentate enthroned in the heavens. 
“It is He that sitteth above the circle of the earth, 
and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers.” 
The God of this period, though far surpassing the 
divinities of Gentile worship, — distinguished from 
them by onliness, as sole governor of heaven and 
earth, and by holiness, as exercising a moral juris- 
diction over moral agents,— was still conceived 
under human limitations. He is still a national 
God, the God of Israel, with a special affection for 
Mount Zion. 

A third, and the supreme stage of Judaism, 
begins with the settlement of Jewish colonies in 
Alexandria and Asia Minor, where contact with 
Greek wisdom stimulated the action of the national 
mind, and gave the religious consciousness its final 
development. In this stage, the idea of God is 
entirely divested of local and national limitations. 
The Alexandrian translators soften down, as far 
as possible, the anthropomorphic expressions of 
the Hebrew text. Jesus, the son of Sirach, evades 
the theophanies. It is no longer the Lord himself 
whom Moses saw face to face, ‘‘as a man talketh 
with a friend,” but only a part of his glory. And 
where the Book of Exodus speaks of the thick 
cloud in which was God, Ecclesiasticus mentions 
the cloud without affirming that God was in it.} 


1 Nicolas, ‘‘ Des Doctrines religieuses des Juits.” 


THE WAY OF RELIGION. 51 


The God of Ecclesiasticus is a God whose “spirit 
fills the earth.” 


III. The progress of religion, like all human 
development, proceeds by action of antagonistic 
powers. The antagonisms most noteworthy are 
those of Faith and Reason, and those of Sense and 
Conscience. 

Religion, in its first manifestation, is an act of 
pure faith. The worshipper embraces without 
question the object on which it is directed, be it 
fetish or person. Whoever professes to represent 
that object is received as infallible authority. 
Where this principle is dominant, it begets a cor- 
responding form of social polity, — hierarchy, or 
theocracy, such as we find in the earlier periods of 
Egyptian history, in Brahmanical India, and among 
the Druids. In this polity the priest is before the 
king, and the State a function of the hierarchy. 
The principle of theocratic or hierarchical govern- 
ment is implicit faith; its consummation is the 
institution of an hereditary priestly caste, whom 
the people regard as not only mediators of God- 
head, but as being themselves divine. This insti- 
tution still survives in the Brahman of Hindostan. 
“The birth of the Brahman,” says Menu, “is the 
eternal incarnation of justice. For the Brahman 
born for the execution of justice is destined to 


52 _ THE WAY OF RELIGION. 


identify himself with Brahm.” “The Brahman 
is sovereign Lord of all beings; all that the world 
contains is his property. By his primogeniture, 
by his eminent birth, he has a right to all that 
exists.” To this day, in Bengal, the lowly Sudra 
erawls on his knees to kiss the feet, or beg parings 
of the nails, of an individual of the priestly class 
nowise superior to himself except in the article of 
birth. The homage is not rendered to wealth or 
power — the object of it may be destitute of either 
— but to the portion of divinity supposed to reside 
in the favored caste, indicated by the bit of sacred 
cord which denotes the twice-born man. There is 
no servility in it, but simple reverence, — pure, 
unquestioning faith. 

When, in the course of popular development or 
military reaction, faith becomes modified by never 
so little intellectual activity, the secular interest 
begins to assert itself. By-and-by it conquers a po- 
sition beside, and co-ordinate with, the sacerdotal ; 
and finally obtains supreme command, subordinat- 
ing the sacerdotal, and controlling its functions. 

The first stage in this process of secularization 
is exemplified in the empire of Japan, where the 
secular and ecclesiastical powers act with parallel 
function. Also in Thibet, where, if the Dalai 
Lama is theoretically incarnate Deity, the partic- 
ular incumbent of the office for the time being 


THE WAY OF RELIGION. 53 


is appointed by the secular power; that is, he is 
one of three Khubilkans, or twice-born children, 
nominated by the Chinese Court, or accepted by 
plenipotentiaries of that government residing in 
Thibet.1 

The next degree of secular encroachment is 
reached, when the temporal sovereign assumes 
the patronage and visible headship of the Church, 
—as does the English Crown of the ecclesiastical 
establishment of Great Britain, and as Peter the 
Great put himself at the head of the Orthodox 
Church of Russia.” 

The third and last stage of secularism in civil 
society is entire separation of Church and State, 
and the irrecognition on the part of the ruling 
powers of any particular religion as divine or more 
obligatory than any other. This is the position of 
the Government of the United States, which knows 
no religion as possessing any other claim than that 
of the numerical majority of its disciples for the 
time being. It recognizes the present fact, nothing 
more. The Government appoints chaplains; and 
the chaplains thus far have been Christian, for the 
reason that the subjects to whom they minister 
are Christian. But nothing in the Constitution 


1 Koppen, “ Die Lamaische Hierarchie und Kirche.” 
2 He is said to have thrown his hunting-knife on the table, 
saying to the assembled clergy, “ There is your Patriarch.” 


54 THE WAY OF RELIGION. 


of the United States forbids the appointment of 
Mohammedan chaplains; on the contrary, the 
principles of the Constitution would seem to re- 
quire the appointment of such, or of those of any 
other faith whose disciples should happen to con- 
stitute the majority of the population to whom 
the chaplain was to minister. Ours is, perhaps, 
the only Government in Christendom in which 
Christianity is not formally recognized ; the only 
one which absolutely discharges itself of all prefer- 
ence for, or interest in, any particular religion as 
possessing a supreme claim. 


Beside the antagonism of faith and reason, 
parallel with it, is the conflict of sense and con- 
science, of the outer and the inner life. Hence 
the distribution of religion in two great classes, 
— polytheism and monotheism, or natural and re- 
vealed. The principle of polytheism is Deity in 
Nature ;—in Nature, not as God’s handiwork, the 
witness of his skill, but as God’s embodiment, as 
divine mediation. The principle of monotheism is 
God in the conscience, — moral obligation divinely 
imposed. Accordingly, Mosaism, the earliest his- 
toric embodiment of that principle, is termed “* The 
Law ;”’ and Mohammedism, its later product, takes 
the name of Islam, “ Righteousness.” ? 


1 So Emanuel Deutsch explains the term. 


THE WAY OF RELIGION. 55 


Religion begins with the worship of things; from 
fetishism it advances to personification of natural 
forces, and proceeds in the direction of personism, 
until some quickened and reflective soul, — in the 
language of theology, some divinely-missioned in- 
dividual, — through predominance in him of the 
moral sense, arrives to the truer conception of 
Deity as moral lawgiver, and adores the God of 
conscience above all gods. Then commences, for 
the age and people in which such prophet appears, 
the reaction of the inner life; the soul asserts its 
supremacy over Nature; religion becomes internal, 
reflective, moral, protestant. Christianity con- 
summated that reaction, completely abolishing the 
Nature-worship and polytheism of the Greco-Ro- 
man world. The two main streams of ancient re- 
ligion, Hellenism and Semitic monotheism, — them- 
selves the débouchures respectively of other, elder, 
Phenician, Egyptian, and Persian faiths, — found 
their confluence in the Christian dispensation. 
Hellenism was completely merged and lost in it. 
Semitic monotheism, after delivering its “ tribute- 
wave,” has preserved an independent existence, 
and still survives in the Judaism of the “ Disper- 
sion;” still flourishes in Mohammedism, one of 
the most wide-spread of existing religions. This, 
and the elder religions of Central and Southern 
Asia, — Brahmanism and Buddhism, — still sway 


06 THE WAY OF RELIGION. 


the major portion of the human race, but with such 
fixity, such incapacity of growth or effective refor- 
mation, as must needs neutralize their historic 
influence, if it does not abridge their duration. 
Extensive and prevailing as they seem when meas- 
ured statistically, they are still but bounded pro- 
vincialisms when viewed in relation to cosmopolitan 
humanity. 

Christianity is the solvent of other religions, and 
may be regarded as the ultimate religion of man. 
In Protestant Christianity, religion has reached 
the extreme limit which divides it from pure sci- 
ence; in its latest development it seems to por- 
tend the union of the two. Further than this 
religion cannot go in the direction of reason, —in 
the rational apprehension of spiritual truth. There 
can be no progress out of Christianity into any 
new religion; unless, indeed, we give that name 
to some future dispensation of science, applying 
ascertained laws and scientific demonstration to 
the ethical and social relations of man. 

Here, then, we have the entire cycle of religious 
development, the outline and ground-plan of the 
religious history of human kind. It begins with 
the worship of irrational objects, and proceeding 
through the various stages of naturalism, sym- 
bolism, personism, ends in the worship of pure 
spirit. 


THE WAY OF RELIGION. ou 


IV. The transitions from natural to revealed 
religion are mediated by extraordinary personal- 
ities, — exceptional individuals, — who accordingly 
are known as mediators in religion, and whose 
names are indelibly written on their respective 
faiths. ‘‘ Personality,” says Bunsen, “is the lever 
of the world’s history.” This is true of the secu- 
lar, but far more true of the spiritual, history of 
man. When we say Moses, Zoroaster, Sakya-Muni, 
Jesus, we enunciate systems, civilizations, eons. 

Far back in the impenetrable twilight of pre- 
historic time, as reflected in Hebrew tradition, oc- 
curs the name of SETH, which — whether it stands 
for an obsolete divinity, as recent criticism con- 
jectures, or whether it represents a son of Adam, 
according to the current interpretation — possesses 
a deep religious significance. With this name, — as 
father, or creator, of ENOS (man), — there connects 
itself in the Biblical record the remarkable state- 
ment, “ Then men began to call upon the name of 
the Lord.” These words shadow forth some irre- 
coverable gospel, some long-perished revelation, 
some reaction against primeval superstition, of 
which but this mystic cipher survives, — sufficient 
to show how deep and aboriginal in human nature 
is the protest of the spirit against the aberrations 
of sense. 

Emerging from this shadow-land of antediluvian 


Be a, tee 
58 THE WAY OF RELIGION. 


tradition, the first religionist who meets us on the 
borders of recorded time is the patriarch Abraham, 
—a name of measureless import in the annals of 
humanity as well as a cardinal date in the history 
of religion. Abraham is the first distinct historic 
personality.1 Not the first historic personage, for 


Egyptian history was old, and had dragged the 


chain of its successive dynasties through long cen- 
turies, when the great Chaldean pitched his tent 
on the plains of Moab. But Egyptian history in 
all those ages presents no defined individuality, 
no character sufficiently marked “to point a moral 
or adorn a tale.” The dynasties evoked by the 
Egyptologer out of the dim past, like the phantom- 
succession of Scottish kings evoked from the dim 
future by the witches in Macbeth, 


“Come like shadows, so depart.” 


Dates and names and shadowy outlines are all 
that Egyptology has raked “from coffined clay.” 
Egyptian history, like its perished forms whom we 
dig out of their crypts, is a bloodless mummy, with 
no expression in its faded lineaments, — important 
only as a measure of time. The first defined 
personality, the first live figure, the first blood- 


1 This was written before Herr Goldziher’s work on Hebrew 
Mythology. There is nothing in that work which alters the 
opinion expressed above. 


“ THE WAY OF RELIGION. 59 


warm individual known to history, is also the 
first reformer, the first monotheist,— the patriarch 
Abraham. It is noticeable, by the way, that the 
reformers in religion, — Abraham, Zoroaster, Mo- 
hammed, Luther, — are historic characters, while 
the authors of idolatrous systems have left no 
trace of their personality. Or, to put the same 
thing in another way, the known founders of re- 
ligions are all reformers. So much more difficult 
is it to abolish falsity and establish truth than to 
authorize and propagate error! Such work de- 
mands a virtue and a force which stamp themselves 
indelibly on their time, and secure to the reformer 
a permanent place in the world’s records. 

Abraham is the first reformer in religion, the 
first protestant. High above the mythical forma- 
tions of his own and subsequent times he lifts his 
sublime head, and displays the deepest faith of the 
soul, — as geology finds on the highest mountain- 
tops the deeper layers of the earth’s crust. 

An anecdote which Biblical tradition has pre- 
served, but which, I fancy, has been misconceived, 
and therefore misrepresented in the process of 
transmission, reveals the nature of the man, and 
comes to us charged with typical import. Settled 
in a land where universal custom required the 
sacrifice of the first-born, whether of brute or 
human parentage, he is tempted, after the example 


60 THE WAY OF RELIGION. 


of the worshippers of Moloch, to make an offering 
of Sazah’s first-born, the son of his hopes, to the 
Lord. But a truer feeling corrects this impulse, 
and stays the filicidal hand. If the piety of cus- 
tom seemed to demand the sacrifice, the piety of 
the heart forbade it. He had courage to believe 
that the God of his devotion did not require the 
monstrous act. It was not his readiness to make 
the conventional’ sacrifice, but the courage that 
refused it in spite of custom and tradition, that 
proved his faith. He dared to live by faith, and 
was counted just in so doing. 

Four thousand years later, when Luther, a 
pilgrim in Rome, in compliance with the painful 
fashion of his time was climbing on his knees the 
Santa Scala of the Lateran, there rushed on his 
soul that saving word, “The just shall live by 
faith.” It was the spirit of Abraham come again 
in the person of a German monk, that moment 
new born of the lineage of faith. 

This, then, is the import of the story; and this 
is the import of Abraham to us and to all time, — 
the voice in the soul correcting tradition ; thought 
purifying faith. 


aT: 
THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. 


HRISTIANITY must be studied in its social 
developments, — must be studied as an or- 
ganized and organizing power in human society, — 
in order to a right understanding of the real import 
of the Christian faith. 

Only through its history can Christianity or any 
religion as a social movement be truly known. 
Whatever develops itself in time requires for its 
full comprehension to be studied in its processes ; 
that is, historically. Even animal, even vegetable, 
natures require to be so studied. It is with strict 
philosophic accuracy that we speak of ‘ Natural 
History,” in reference to such studies. The na- 
ture of the bird is not exhausted by the study of 
the egg, or the plumage, or the note, or the anat- 
omy. To these must be added the knowledge of 
its habits, its relations to its kind and to other 
kinds, its movements and migrations: in a word, 
its history. To know the oak, it is not sufficient 
to study the acorn or the sapling. We need for 
that purpose the full-grown tree, with the wear of 


62 THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. 


centuries chronicled in its annual rings. More 
emphatically, of man our best knowledge is not 
derived from a physical analysis of the human 
frame, or metaphysical analysis of the human mind. 
We may know every bone and muscle in the body, 
and we may know every faculty and law of the 
mind, and still be very ignorant of human nature 
until we study it as it manifests itself in action, 
and trace its action through successive ages. Our 
best anthropology is learned, not from Haller or 
Hunter or Kant, but from Tacitus and Gibbon. 
Of institutions, human and divine, of systems of 
belief, of religious dispensations, of the Christian 
dispensation in particular, the same law holds: 
they are known by their history. Christianity is 
known by its history. As a sentiment affecting 
the individual soul, as a doctrine determining in- 
dividual faith, we may learn it from the Gospels ; 
but not as a world-dispensation involving the 
spiritual destiny of many generations. Christian- 
ity in that sense can no more be known from the 
Gospels than the oak can be known from the acorn ; 
than the river that traverses continents, that feeds 
itself with streams from a thousand hills, and bears 
half the commerce of the world on its bosom, can 
be known from the trickling rill or sequestered 
pool to which curiosity has finally traced it. 
Rather the pool itself would be unknown, except 


THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. 63 


to the heron that dips her wing in its wave, or the 
deer that browses by its marge, had not the mar- 
vel of the river first directed inquiry to the 
marvellous source. It was Christianity, already 
established in the world, that led to the study of 
the Gospels; not the study of the Gospels that 
revealed Christianity. The gospel itself— I mean 
the gospel record — is the product of Christian his- 
tory, not its source. Who knows how much or 
how little of the observation and experience of the 
actual eye-witnesses of the ministry of Jesus has 
come down to us? It is impossible to say to what 
extent the views and theories and disputes of more 
than one generation of believers, — party interests 
and ecclesiastical policy, — may have modified those 
venerable and priceless records which bear the 
titles of Matthew and John, and which, whatever 
their origin and composition, are traceable in their 
present form to within a century only of the events 
they commemorate. The value of the record is 
nowise impaired by this uncertainty. The script- 
ures of the New Testament contain enough of the 
mind of Christ to serve as a standard of Christian 
truth, and to furnish a well of refreshing in which 
a corrupted and penitent Church may wash and be 
clean. But they do not contain the sum of Christi- 
anity, no more than the acorn contains the oak. 

It is a mistake to suppose that the Apostolic age 


64 THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. 


was the perfect age of the Church, and every sub- 
sequent age a wider departure from the truth, a 
steady progress in corruption. A truer idea of the 
Christian dispensation is expressed in the word 
development. Christianity is not a fixed but a 
flowing quantity and power. It is not to be found 
complete and entire in any scripture, church, or 
age, but unfolds itself successively through many 
scriptures, churches, ages. It is not a totality, but 
a process ; a process of which the Church — that 
is, Christian society — is at once the medium and the 
exponent, and ecclesiastical history the report. 
Let ecclesiastical history, then, understand its 
function to be that of exhibiting the progress of 
Christianity as it organizes itself in human soci- 
ety, and the progress of society as organized by 
Christianity. 

This twofold process is subject to laws without 
which, and the belief in which, all history is a mere 
collection of dead facts without sense or purpose. 
These laws in the sphere of the Church are all 
comprised in that Providential agency which the- 
ology terms the “ Holy Spirit.” The action of 
the ‘“*Holy Spirit”? is the fundamental postulate, 
the organic hypothesis of Christian Church-history, 
without which the study of that history is meaning- 
less and valueless. 

I propose to consider this agency which shapes 


THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. 65 


and constitutes the history of the Church, in some 
of its aspects. 


It manifests itself, in the first place, as Ordina- 
tion, —a divine necessity directing and controlling 
the order of events. In history as in Nature there 
is nothing fortuitous, nothing wilful, nothing that 
could have been other than it was. Human free- 
will is the instrument employed ; but the result is 
necessary. Every finite will is divinely circum- 
scribed ; and the sum of all wills is comprehended 
in the orbit of the Universal Will, and resolves 
itself into that. This first and vital principle of 
all historical science applies with peculiar emphasis 
to the history of the Church, and is all the more 
important to the right understanding of the facts, 
the more the facts appear to contradict it. 


To the superficial glance, the history of the 
Church appears to be a tissue of accidents, a wild 
and wayward deviation at every step from the 
probable and looked-for and natural direction. 

A native of Palestine, and destined in the views 
and expectations of its first teachers to occupy 
that soil with its supreme power and central life, 
Christianity soon became an alien in the land of 
its birth. Of oriental lineage, it never perceptibly 
influenced the civilization of the East; but casting 

6 


= 


66 THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. 


aside its oriental costume, which survives only as 
a fossil relic of Biblical archeology, forgetful of its 
Asiatic blood, it turned its back on ancestral Shem, 
and settled with the children of Javan who divided 
the isles of the Gentiles. The seed of Abraham 
identified itself with the uncircumcised West. 
Entrusted to simple provincials whose little world 
was all- contained between Lebanon and Carmel, 
whose highest conception of their mission was to 
reinstate the Judaic dynasty, it was suddenly 
snatched out of their hands by a daring outsider 
who had never known Christ in the flesh; who 
boasted that Ais Christianity was an indepen- 
dent revelation, and would take no instructions 
from those who had the gospel direct from its au- 
thor; who magnificently set aside the foremost of 
them all, and withstood him to his face ; who called 
himself an Apostle, but was not so regarded by 
the other Twelve; who gave the religion an en- 
tirely new aspect, and yet came to be regarded as 
its authorized and principal exponent. It began 
with announcing a heavenly kingdom, and _hast- 
ened to establish an earthly one. Instead of erect- 
ing, as was fondly expected, its throne on Zion, it 
selected for its capital the mother of abominations, 
the Babylon of the Apocalypse. It began with 
establishing social equality, even to community of 
goods; but soon developed a priestly aristocracy, 


THE WAY OF HAISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. 67 


the most complex and oppressive the world has 
ever known. It began with hereditary horror of 
graven images, and came to be the horror of Ish- 
mael for its idolatry. It began with worshipping 
Spirit in spirit and truth, and it came to worship 
a morsel of bread. 

If we come to doctrines, we find equal cause 
for surprise in its wide and apparently wilful 
divergence from the primitive faith, and in the 
trivial causes which decided the prevalence of the 
one or the other opinion in the Church. Compare 
the discourses of Jesus as reported by the evange- 
lists, or even the confession of faith known as the 
Apostles’ Creed, with the doctrines propounded by 
the Councils of the fourth and fifth centuries, with 
the “Summa” of the thirteenth, with the Triden- 
tine decisions of the sixteenth; and see how huge 
a nimbus of ecclesiastical orthodoxy envelops how 
small a nucleus of primitive faith. The christology 
of the Church, for more than a century, fluctuated 
between Athanasian orthodoxy on the one hand 
and Arian, Nestorian, and Eutychian heresies on 
the other. The decisions of the Councils did not 
always coincide with the general opinion of Christ- 
endom at the time ; and only the accidental circum- 
stance of imperial patronage, concurring with the 
views of interested prelates, prevented the deci- 
sion of the fourth Council from being reversed by 


68 THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. 


another in the brief period which intervened be- 
tween the fall of the Western Empire and the 
schism of the Churches, and left the doctrine of 
Latin Christianity respecting the nature of Christ 
where the middle of the fifth century had placed 
it. The policy which fixed the faith of nations 
was not always regulated by the piety and wisdom 
of those who would seem most fit to direct it. 
Cabal and intrigue, the accidents of life, court 
patronage, intimidation, and even armed force 
have sometimes carried the day in the action of the 
Councils and the conduct of the Churches. The 
turbulent ferocity of Cyril decided the issues of 
the Council of Ephesus, and gave a goddess to the 
Christian world. The sister of one Caesar caused 
the triumph of the Arians, and the sister of another 
procured the defeat of the Nestorians. The death 
of two emperors,! leaving their orthodox widows 
on the throne, established the worship of idols in 
the East. The perfidy of another instigated the 
reformation in Bohemia, the forerunner of Protest- 
antism and the parent of one of the purest of 
existing sects. The want of a marriage license 
drove Popery from England ; a failing exchequer 
drove Protestantism from France. 

From these and numberless other instances it 
might seem as if the course of ecclesiastical his- 


1 Leo and Theophilus. 


THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. 69 


tory, and with it the fortunes of Christianity, were 
left to chance and human caprice ; as if the condi- 
tion of Christianity at any moment were the mere 
fortuitous result of such agencies. But no one can 
suppose this, who considers for a moment the con- 
sequences implied in it. Such a supposition is 
fatal to any rational idea of Divine revelation. 

For why do we believe ina self-revealing Spirit ? 
Why believe that the heavens in man were opened, 
and a fresh word from the bosom of the Everlast- 
ing interpolated in the groping intellect’s uncertain 
process, but because we see such apocalypse to be 
needful for the future and constant guidance of 
the race? And howis that end to be accomplished 
except by the stated, normal action of the same 
Spirit which evolved that gospel in the fulness of 
time, and which never, in all time past, had left 
the world without witness and without mediation 
of the godhead, and without a word proportioned to 
its day? ‘There are Christians who seem to think 
of the Holy Spirit as the ancients did of their 
Astrea. They suppose that it had its dwelling on 
this earth in the golden age (the apostolic age) 
of the Church, but fled up to heaven in the brazen 
and iron ages which succeeded, and has been to 
the Church ever since but a distant star in the 
zodiac of old traditions. I believe, on the contrary, 
that the Holy Spirit, — in whatsoever manifestation 


70 THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. 


or disguise, illumination or occultation, —has never 
been wanting to the Church of Christ; has been in 
sunshine or in shade, in triumph or in passion, the 
“effectual working in the measure of every part,” 
to “the increase of the body” and the “ edifying 
of itself in love ;’’—now emerging into solemn 
epiphany in seasons of “refreshing from the pres- 
ence of the Lord,” now engulphed in disastrous 
twilight ; but still there, still active, though all its 
action may, at some dear crisis, have been confined 
to one poor, hunted, cowering sect, or folded up in 
a single agonizing breast. Whatever reason there 
is for supposing a revelation at all, for believing in 
divine dispensations of truth, the same reason com- 
pels us to believe that such a dispensation, once 
initiated in human society, is not left to itself to 
take what direction chance may impart, to prosper 
or fail as chance may decide ; but in all its develop- 
ments and phases is still subject to the same Power, 
and still directed by the same Wisdom, which dis- 
pensed the original word, and planted a new heaven 
and a new earth in the human breast. Without 
the supposition of the Holy Spirit as its method 
and law, there is no ecclesiastical history that 
deserves investigation. 


Another aspect in which this agency presents 
itself is Hducation. We have viewed it as divine 


THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. 71 


necessity, we have next to consider it as divine 
beneficence. The Spirit not only appoints, but 
appoints with a puirpose,—a wise and benevolent 
purpose directing the order of events, and causing 
them to co-operate in promoting the spiritual growth 
of society; that is, in educating society. There 
is and can be, in the nature of things, no absolute 
demonstration of such a purpose. It is pure hy- 
pothesis, which the consummation of all things 
alone can verify. But the need of this hypothesis 
to rationalize the portents and enormities of his- 
tory, to bring them into harmony with any intel- 
ligible, conceivable order of the universe, the 
atheistic alternative of no purpose and no Provi- 
dence involved in its rejection,—these are its 
warrant and abundant justification. 

History, or the world of conscious, voluntary 
agencies, is more prolific, as might be expected, in 
disturbances and anomalies, in horrors and atroci- 
ties, than the unconscious, involuntary world of 
Nature. But geology knows that the earth of to- 
day, — our human earth with its apt appointments 
and nice accommodation to human uses, its strati- 
fied mountains and alluvial valleys, its granite and 
slate and coal and iron,—is the product of those 
stupendous revolutions that perplexed the Saurian 
nations of pre-Adamite time. And humanity trusts 
that the deadly encounters, the atrocious wrongs, 


72 THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. 1 


the persecutions and fightings, the blood and crime 
of past societies shall furnish the necessary social 
deposits, the historic strata and ecclesiastical al- 
luvium of future composed and tranquil ages, 
when our present imperfect organizations shall 
be known only as steps toward a new and replen- 
ished earth. 

Nowhere is the dark side of history more promi- 
nent than it is in the annals of the Church. And 
what to Christian faith is more perplexing than 
the horrors of Christian warfare, than Christian 
persecutions, and all the atrocities committed in 
the name of religion, is the wide and seemingly 
wiliul divergence of the doctrine and practice of 
the Church from the precepts of the Gospel. 
When we turn from the teachings of Jesus to 
John-of-Damascus’s or Anselm’s doctrine of Re- 
demption, or St. Thomas’s doctrine of Sacraments ; 
from the Agape of the Apostles to the High Mass ; 
from the Council at Jerusalem to the Council of 
Jonstance, — we are conscious of a gulf imperfectly 
bridged by the Christian name. I have often 
thought that if I were to undertake, as an exercise 
of ingenuity, to construct a system of religion as 
far as possible removed from the Christianity of 
the Gospel, without abandoning the Christian 
name, I should be likely to invent some such 
system as that of the Church of Rome. And cer- 


THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. 73 


tainly many of the doctrines and practices of that 
Church, — such as indulgences, transubstantia- 
tion, penances and masses for the dead, — must 
be regarded by all but Romanists themselves, 
however liberal and philosophically tolerant, as 
inventions and corruptions which have foisted 
themselves on the primitive faith. But to say 
that the entire doctrine and practice of the Church, 
whereinsoever it departs from the Gospel record 
and the teachings of the Apostles, — that is, where 
Gospel and Epistles, as we understand them, fur- 
nish no basis for such doctrine or practice, —is 
sheer corruption, this is to adopt a position which 
I find it impossible to reconcile with any worthy 
or tenable view of Divine revelation. It suppo- 
ses Christ to be defeated by Anti-Christ ; it sup- 
poses revelation to be a failure, and the Word 
of God to return unto him void, not having ac- 
complished the thing which he pleased, nor pros- 
pered in that whereunto he sent it. The idea of 
Divine revelation involves as its necessary corol- 
lary a Providential oversight of that revelation, a 
Providential order in its developments. And if 
we allow a Providential order in the history of the 
Church, we concede to it the order best adapted 
to the spiritual wants of the time and the educa- 
tion of the human mind. The religion of the 
Middle-Age is certainly not the Christianity of 


74 THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. — 


the New Testament; but we are not therefore 
authorized to pronounce it unchristian or anti- 
christian. The New Testament is the highest, 
but by no means the only, authority in matters of 
Christian doctrine. To maintain that it is so, is an 
error of Protestantism, which a candid and enlight- 
ened Protestantism in this age of the Church should 
reconsider and renounce. It is an error involving 
consequences as grave as the Catholic theory of 
tradition to which it was opposed. We cannot 
claim inspiration for the Scriptures and deny it to 
the Church. The former depends on the latter. 
It was the Church that decided, and that after 
much controversy, of what books the New Testa- 
ment should consist. And all the books of our 
present New Testament were not embraced in the 
canons either of Laodicea or of Carthage. 

I do not say that the Church was infallible in 
her speculative views, that she had sight of the 
absolute truth, or came so near to it as enlightened 
individuals who in all periods have dissented from 
her judgments, —the heretics of elder and more 
recent times. But I believe that the Church was 
wise in her practical decisions, wiser even than 
she knew; wise with the unconscious wisdom of 
spiritual instinct. In other words, she was in- 
spired. Even in those cases in which her de- 
cisions seem most repugnant to reason, her course 





THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. 5 


may have been divinely shaped in accordance with 
ends divinely ordained. The truths of the time 
are not always truths of pure reason; and still 
they are truths. 

One or two cases may serve for illustration. 


The earliest doctrinal decisions of the Church 
are those which assert the deity of Christ. What- 
ever may be our private convictions regarding this 
doctrine, whatever we may think of the evidence 
for it or against it in the writings of the New Tes- 
tament, thus much is certain, —that the deepest 
consciousness and truest life of the Church in 
the fourth century were with the doctrine and 
for it. 

Equally certain is the wonder-working influence 
of this idea on the heart of Christendom, when 
once by faith it became a constituent of the men- 
tal life of the Church. It brought the individual 
mind and heart into close, immediate, and even 
sensible communion with God; it made the Church 
the veritable kingdom of God to believers; it gave 
her a sense of Divine authority and sufficiency, of 
saving necessity and absoluteness, which satisfied 
her own consciousness of rightful sway and carried 
conviction of that right to others. It was not 
enough in rude ages to be intellectually assured of 
the truth of Christianity as a system of faith and 


76 THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. 


practice; it was necessary to have a God his- 
torically present and verbally speaking to the 
soul. On the other hand, the philosophic mind, 
impatient of propositions which it cannot range 
and schematize in its own fashion, may find in the 
very terms which formulate this dogma in the 
language of the Councils a way of escape from 
any violence done to the understanding by an 
indiscreet presentation of the subject. 

Nowhere, it seems to me, is the guiding Provi- 
dence of God in history more conspicuous than it 
is in the wording of the final dictum of the Coun- 
cils respecting the nature of Christ. The chris- 
tology of the Church was the growth of centuries. 
The homoousian theory passed through several 
stages before it was perfected and given to the 
world in the form which remains to this day the 
genuine ‘‘ Orthodox” view of Christ, though very 
unlike the soi-disant, Patri-passian Orthodoxy of our 
time. The first four cecumenical councils represent 
its principal phases and successive modifications, as 
developed by the exigency of different periods and 
conflicting minds. The Council of Nica decided 
that Christ was one with God in substance ; that of 
Constantinople reaffirmed this consubstantiality and 
applied it to the Holy Spirit. At Ephesus it was 
determined that in Christ two natures unite in 
one person ; and finally, at Chalcedon it was con- 


a 


THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. TT 


eluded that, though the person be one, the natures 
remain two natures still. This was the final tri- 
umph of Athanasian orthodoxy over the heresies 
opposed to it. It was well for the Church and 
well for humanity that this view prevailed as 
against the Arian and against the monophysite. 
Both these doctrines flout the humanity of Jesus. 
The monophysite perceived only deity in Christ. 
The Arian saw neither God nor man, nor a God- 
man, but a hypothetical being who is different 
from both,—a sheer invention, an unintelligible 
ghostly chimera, whom one can neither repose in 
as true God nor sympathize with as genuine man. 
The Athanasian doctrine preserves the humanity 
intact, and even guards it with jealous care, leav- 
ing me at liberty, as my spiritual wants or mental 
habits incline, to fasten on the human or divine in 
the hypostatic union, —ovdauod Ths Tav piccwv 
Siahopds avnpnuevns Sia Tihv Evwow, colouévys dé 
uaddov THs idudTNTos éExatépas dicews, Kal eis ev 
Mpocwtrov Kal wiay UTocTacW cuVTpExovons. 

The Catholic or Orthodox christology is pre- 
cisely that which, by the comprehensiveness and 
impartiality of its statement, allows the largest 
liberty of speculation, and admits of the great- 
est diversity of view. It merely affirms what 
every one believes, who believes in Christianity 
at all,—that God and man wrought together in 


78 THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. 


Christ for the regeneration of human kind. In 
what way and measure these two agencies com- 
bined in the one pocwrror, it does not undertake 
to determine. Your faith may prefer to dwell on 
the God in Christ ; my spiritual wants may need the 
man. Here is that which gives to each what each 
demands, unprejudiced and unimpaired: salva pro- 
prietate utriusque nature ; verbo operante quod verbi 
est, et carne exsequente quod carnis est. The Arian 
doctrine, on the other hand, is a rigidly defined, 
abrupt hypothesis, intractable, insoluble; to be 
taken bodily, if at all, and held by an act of vo- 
lition as a stubborn anomaly which the mind can 
neither historically adjust nor philosophically as- 
similate. 


Another instance in which the historical issue 
conflicts with the rational, Protestant judgment 
is that of the Council of Ephesus, which asserted 
the godhead of the mother of Jesus by the title of 
Georoxos (God’s mother), and deposed the patriarch 
Nestorius for disputing that phrase. 

When we read in the Gospel the story of Jewish 
Mary, the descendant of forty generations of mono- 
theists and idol-haters, the meek girl betrothed to 
one as lowly as herself, the fond mother whose whole 
future is concentrated in her first-born, the careful 
housewife intent on domestic offices ; when, with this 


{ 


THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. 79 


conception in our mind, we turn to the fifth and 
following centuries of the Christian Church, and find 
this Galilean woman converted into a goddess, the 
foremost figure in the Christian ritual, — this daugh- 
ter of a nation whose prophets denounced the ven- 
geance of God on the recreant women of the tribe 
for burning incense to the “‘ Queen of Heaven,” her- 
self transfigured into a Queen of Heaven, and receiy- 
ing incense in that name, — we are conscious of a 
startling discrepancy between the Gospel and the 
Church. We perceive that, in migrating from its 
native fold in the bosom of Israel to alien Gentile 
climes, Christianity cast aside the sacred traditions 
of its Hebrew ancestry, and compounded with the 
profane Roman and Greek. Our first feeling is one 
of indignation and disgust at what seems a gross 
and wilful perversion of the purpose and spirit of 
our religion. But when we consider all that the | 
Virgin was to the Church of the Middle Age, — 
how, when in the lapse of time and the absence of 
the Scriptures the Son of Man had receded so far 
into absolute godhead that, though theoretically 
human still, his humanity and with it his media- 
torial character had quite faded from the popular 
mind, — how, then, the Mother replaced the Son, 
and became the acknowledged mediatrix between 
God and man; when we consider how this radi- 
ant figure of the medieval cult embodied to the 


‘F 
¢ 


80 THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. 


popular mind, together with all that is holy and 
reverend in Deity, all that is congenial and kindly 
in man, and especially all that is pure and tender 
in woman, —that in her, as never before and no- 
where else, were impersonated spiritual beauty and 
celestial love, — that in her for the first time the 
world possessed a moral ideal, and with it a tri- 
umphant vindication of womanhood; when, above 
all, we reflect that the Virgin was the only intelli- 
gible manifestation and representative of Divine 
grace, that in her. and through her the pardoning 
merey of God was revealed and dispensed to an 
age incapable of apprehending spiritual ideas which 
were not embodied in a sensuous type; and when 
we think of the mighty influence which such a 
personality, which the constant presence of such 
an idea, must have had in refining and educating 
the mind of the time, — our disgust will be changed 
to admiration of the Providential wisdom which 
furnished so important an aid to spiritual culture 
and devout aspiration in the wreck of conventions, 
the dissolution of manners, the shock of lawless 
violence, the triumph of brute force, the desolation 
and disorganization which succeeded the decay of 
the old civilization. Over all the tumult and tem- 
pests of that wild time this gentle and benign form 
brooded like a dove, rebuking violence, compas- 
sionating sorrow, calming grief, refreshing hope, at- 


a 


THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. 81 


tracting devotion, forgiving penitent guilt ; every- 
where composing, encouraging, reconciling. It is 
true the Mother in a measure supplanted the Son 
and even concealed the Father, filling up the whele 
field of the Christian’s heaven, receiving the honors 
and apparently fulfilling the functions of the god- 
head. The creature was preferred before the 
Creator: so far the action of the Church was seem- 
ingly a return to heathenism. Yet it was no 
heathen goddess which the Church adored in the 
person of Mary, no imperfect creature disfigured 
by human frailties and passions, but the very 
beauty of holiness ; a faultless image invested — so 
far as the mind of that age could apprehend them 
—with the veritable attributes of Deity. Practi- 
cally it was God himself whom the mariolater ad- 
dressed, — the Eternal, with a tenderer name and 
more intelligible accidents and more defined per- 
sonality. It is the nature of devout sentiment, 
when once it becomes dominant in the mind and 
acts independently of the understanding, to body 
forth the object of its devotion, to give form and 
feature to the infinite, to humanize if not to idolize 
its God. We may well pardon medieval devotion, 
which gave its God the form most intelligible to 
its own thought and most grateful to its own feel- 
ing. So far as the religious life of the individual 


is concerned, it matters less to what idea of divin- 
6 


82 THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. 


ity we pray (so it embrace our highest conceptions 


of the holy and the good), than it does that the ~ 


prayer itself be fervent and true. It would seem 
as if the Almighty had purposely shrouded himself 
behind this effulgent image, and thrust it ostensi- 
bly forth as the fittest demonstration and truest 
embodiment of those attributes of divinity which 
it most concerned the popular mind to believe and 
to cherish, — especially of divine grace, which hav- 
ing been excluded from the creed of the Church, 
except as a special distinction conferred on certain 
elect natures, reappeared in its mythology. It was 
the most effectual if not the only way in which the 
characteristic grace of the Gospel could be pre- 
sented to the unreflecting mind of the time. 
Nestorius and his party were banished and per- 
secuted, not for refusing homage to the Virgin, 
but because they protested against the title by 
which it was proposed to designate the new divin- 
ity, a severe measure, seeing that the protest 
probably sprung from a truer piety than that which 
dictated the dogma. But this historic wrong, -if 
we so regard it, was historically righted and com- 
pensated in the final event. The pious patriarch 
died the victim of unjust persecution; but his 
party survived, and with them his faith and name. 
The Nestorians became a large and powerful sect 
independent of the Catholic Church. They spread 


THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. 83 


through Assyria, Persia, Egypt, Arabia, India, 
they crossed the Imaus and established a church in 
Tartary. The Christians of St. Thomas, on the 
coast of Malabar, are their descendants. They are 
still extant in various parts of Asia. In their 
origin the most primitive of Christian churches, 
older than the Roman, more eastern than the 
Greek, they have perpetuated Christianity in the 
land of its birth. 

I will cite but one more instance in which the 
course of ecclesiastical history appears at first to 
contradict our ideal, but is found on reflection to 
justify itself as Providential wisdom. My third 
example is the stubborn policy of Rome, which 
created, or which failed to heal, the successive 
ruptures of the Church. Beside the Nestorian 
schism and other lesser fragments, Christendom is 
now divided into three great sections, — the Greek, 
the Latin, and the Protestant Churches. This 
division, of which Rome lays the blame on those 
whom she excluded, is in fact her own work, — 
the result of that imperious absolutism with which 
she has always trampled on the private conscience, 
and required unconditional surrender of opinion. 
This policy ecclesiastical Rome inherited from 
pagan Rome. The Emperor Trajan established 
the principle, not unknown to modern and even 
republican legislation, the precise enunciation of 


84 THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. 7 


which he owed to Pliny, —that whatsoever the 
private convictions of a subject, whether right or 
wrong — gualecumque esset quod faterentur—the 
obstinate persistence in it, contrary to the will of 
government, was a punishable offence; debere pu- 
nirt. In conformity with this principle, Rome in 
the fifth century not only repudiated the imperial 
Henoticon, which aimed to restore the integrity of 
the Christian communion, but excommunicated the 
Greek churches through their patriarchs for their 
complicity in that instrument. In this spirit she 
cast out the Iconoclasts in the eighth century, and 
broke with Eastern Christendom in the ninth and 
the eleventh. And when in the fifteenth, at the 
Councils of Ferrara and of Florence, the attempt 
was made to reconcile and reunite these severed — 
fragments, the project was frustrated by Rome’s 
‘insisting on the recantation and renunciation by 
the Greeks, of the principal points of difference 
between them. With the same pervicacity she 
turned a deaf ear to the cry for “reform in the 
head and members,” which went up from the heart 
of Christian Germany with the dawning of the 
Rénaissance, set up Councils in opposition to the 
reform Councils of Constance and Basil, and forced 
the Protestant schism by excommunicating the re- 
formers of the sixteenth century, who wished to 
purify, not to divide, and would have given their 


THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. 85 


lives to preserve the unity of the Church, would 
Rome but consent to have it purged of its corrup- 
tions. And finally, when forced by the pressure 
of the North and West to call the Council of Trent 
for the express purpose of reforming abuses and 
recovering by reform the Protestant secession, her 
intrigues brought about the contrary effect, per- 
petuated the most offensive features of Romanism, 
and established an irreparable breach between the 
Roman and the Saxon mind. Better break than 
bend ; better a divided Church than the smallest 
concession; better lose a kingdom than abate a 
tittle of her arbitrary will,— has been from the 
beginning the one unvarying principle of Roman 
policy. 

Our moral sentiment of course condemns this 
policy, so far as the spirit and temper of Rome are 
expressed by it. But considered as the means and 
condition of spiritual development and human 
progress, our riper judgment will rejoice in it. 
The idea of catholicity, of ecclesiastical integrity, 
of a single individual church whose heart shall be 
the metropolis and whose extremities the outskirts 
of civilization, which shall clasp the world with its 
binding sacraments, and string the nations like 
beads on the thread of a common confession: one 
Lord, one faith, one baptism, — this idea is pleas- 
ant to the mind and dear to the heart of humanity. 


86 THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. : 


When we consider what such a church might 
accomplish for the civilization and sanctification of 
human kind, no wonder that the instinct of early 
Christendom demanded it! No wonder that ear- 
nest spirits in all time have striven for it as the 
true fulfilment of the gospel’s mission, the realiza- 
tion of that divine word, “‘ That they all may be 
one, as I Father in thee and thou in me, that they 
may be one in us”! Unquestionably, a Catholic 
Church, in some sense, is the rightful heritage of 
the Spirit, the consummation to which Faith may 
legitimately look, the ideal which Faith is bound 
to cherish. 

But here, as everywhere, the ideal and the actual 
are wide asunder. It is a long way between the 
conception and the consummation; and not only 
long but devious, circuitous, oftentimes seemingly 
retrograde. The path which may ultimately lead 
to the goal tends meanwhile in a contrary direction. 
Whoever studies attentively the times of those 
schisms, and the nationalities divided by them, will 
perceive that temporary separation, if not final di- 
vorce, was required in order that each new era might 
develop itself freely, unhampered by the old. 

The real quarrel between the Greek Church and 
the Latin, if I rightly interpret it, was not the 
worship of images, nor the use of unleavened 
bread, nor the different procession of the Holy 


THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. 87 


Ghost; but something more latent, unknown to 
either party, and undefinable, It was the differ- 
ence which divides the youth from the child. 
Latin Christianity was rapidly developing a sub- 
jectiveness and a sentimentality unknown. to clas- 
sic antiquity, and which bred disaffection toward 
the sensuous, objective Greek. The Greek, on the 
other hand, always deficient in inwardness, had no 
taste for Western devotion, and no sympathy with 
Western romance. This antagonism, which dis- 
played itself so glaringly in the time of the Cru- 
sades, was sufficiently developed in the eighth and 
ninth centuries to render impossible a cordial 
union and harmonious co-operation between the 
two churches. The mutual excommunications and 
formal separations of that crisis did not originate 
but only declared a breach beyond the power of 
synods to repair. 

Six centuries later, there arose between the 
Latin and the German nationalities a feud anal- 
ogous to that which divided the Latin and the 
Greek. As that was a rupture between boyhood 
and youth, so this may be designated as a revolu- 
tion separating youth from manhood. In the for- 
mer case it was a new eon, an age of romance 
disengaging itself from the sensuous world of an- 
tiquity ; in the other it was also a new eon, an 
era of science emancipating itself from the age 


a4 


88 THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. 


of romance. Then it was sentiment contending 
against sense ; now it was science in conflict with 
sentiment. 

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when 
Europe began to weary of the saddle, when gun- 
powder was exploding feudalism, and when the 
printing-press was striking off the first proofs of a 
new dispensation, — the awakened intellect, hith- 
erto the docile pupil of the Church, and the faith- 
ful vassal of suzerain Rome, became conscious of 
a want which the Church could no longer supply ; 
became conscious of a mission whose supreme 
function was to summon Rome herself, and all 
things else in heaven above and on the earth 
beneath, to its own inexorable bar. Accordingly, 
the alternative of the sixteenth century was not 
simply whether Rome should reform specific abuses 
or Protestantism secede, but whether Rome should 
lay down her assumed infallibility, or the human 
intellect forego its appointed career. And since 
neither course supposed in this alternative was 
possible, a schism was the inevitable result. Rome 
might reform specific abuses, and behooved to do so ; 
but she could not renounce her assumed infallibility 
- without a suicide involving the downfall of the en- 
tire fabric of the Latin Church, — an event which, 
in that day, would have been as perilous to Pro- 
_testant Christendom as to Catholic. But neither, 


THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. 89 


on the other hand, could the intellect renounce its 
divinely-appointed career, nor pursue it in subjec- 
tion to papal authority. Science could not stoop 
to prince or pontiff for leave to see and to say 
what she saw. She could not sit at the feet of 
Holiness to know if the sun stood still, or the earth 
was put together in six times twenty-four hours, 
or Moses and Matthew composed the writings 
which bear their names. It was necessary that 
Rome with her authority and Protestantism with 
its science should part company, that each might 
unfold its own life and fulfil its mission independ- 
ently of the other, and both in their several and 
separate spheres work together for the common 
end, —the education of man. 

Thus we have in the three great sections of the 
Christian world three epochs of Christian history, 
representing three life-periods, — childhood, youth, 
and full age; the periods respectively of Sense, of 
Sentiment, and of Science. 

To the spiritual eye these superficial antitheses 
of Greek Church and Latin, Catholic and Protest- 
ant, are resolved in the higher synthesis of a com- 
mon origin and a common Lord; a Christendom 
whose Head is one though its polities are many, 
and whose kingdom is entire however its commun- 
ion be divided. The Holy Catholic Church, which 
Faith demands and expects, is no illusion; it 


90 THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. 


exists already in the catholizing consciousness of 
true piety. Wherever there is a catholic mind, 
there, subjectively, is the Catholic Church. 


I have spoken of historic Christianity as the 
process of the Spirit by which the divine idea of 
the Gospel is to be realized in time. We have 
viewed it in its two aspects of necessity and be- 
neficence, with the two corresponding functions, 
divine ordination and divine education. But the 
action of the Spirit is not exhausted in these 
functions. There remains a third. It les very 
near; it is prefigured in the view which the Chris- 
tian world entertains of the person of Christ. 

Universal Christendom holds that, in some sense 
or other, God and man were united in the person 
of Christ. I say universal Christendom, because, 
historically, the exceptions are not worth noticing. 
Whether we state it in the language of the Serip- 
ture, “In him dwelt all the fulness of the god- 
head bodily,” or adopt the Orthodox phraseology 
of two natures in one person, or say with the Uni- 
tarian that Christ was divinely inspired, especially 
inspired, possessed of the Spirit “without meas- 
ure,” — the truth received is practically the same: 
the difference is in breadth of statement, not in 
substance of doctrine. But Christ, as the Head 
of the Hcclesia, is the prototype of the Christian 





: 
: 


a 


THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. 91 


world, the representative of the new heaven and 
new earth, the spiritual cosmos which the Chris- 
tian ages are expected to unfold. Whatever was 
true of Jesus historically is theoretically and pro- 
spectively true of Christianized man. Christiani- 
zation is mutual adoption of God and man. 

The consummation of this process would be to 
realize in all men the same union of the human 
and the Divine which the Church ascribes to its 
Head. Historic Christianity is the movement of 
society in that direction, with all the hindrances 
and contradictions and deviations and retrograda- 
tions which attend it, and which checker and date 
the course of time. It is the progress of society in 
that union with God which humanity has in Christ. 


Accordingly, the third function of ecclesiastical 
history to which I allude is expressed by the term 
Incarnation. God incarnates himself in human 
society just so far as the kingdom of God is estab- 
lished in the world. Every triumph of truth and 
right which Christianity achieves over the selfish 
passions of men, like the abolition of slavery and 
the emancipation of woman ; every principle of jus- 
tice which gains ascendancy in human legislation, 
which incorporates itself with civil government 
and becomes an organic element of society, such as 
political equality; every institution which labors 


‘ " 


92 THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. 1 


in the name of Christ for the relief of human mis- 
ery and the furtherance of human well-being, such 
as hospitals for the sick and insane and ministries 
to the poor, —is a step in that progressive incar- 
nation of divine attributes in human kind, which 
illustrates and fulfils the prophetic prayer of Christ, 
*« That they all may be one in us.” 

Christian history, —that is, the written history 
of Christian society, — exhibits but little progress 
as yet in this direction. And had we no other 
data from which to judge of the future of human- 
ity than what is chronicled in the books, one 
might almost despair of the gospel and of man. 
So many centuries has the name of Christ been 
graved on the forehead of society, and with all 
reverence named of men, and so little has the 
thing, the spirit, prevailed which that name im- 
ports! So many centuries has Christianity builded 
its churches and administered its sacraments and 
published its scriptures, and so little as yet has 
been seen and felt of Christ! The written chroni- 
cle seems rather to conceal than to reveal him, 
and the first impression of humanity regarding it 
might well find vent in the cry, “‘ They have taken 
away my Lord, and I know not where they have 
laid him!” But this first impression is founded 
on a very superficial view of Christian history 
and the Christian world. The written chronicle 


THE WAY OF HISTORIC OHRISTIANITY. 98 


is necessarily a very imperfect account of what has 
been effected by the gospel. This is not what 
the records have usually undertaken to exhibit. 
They report the exterior constitution of the Church, 
not its interior life. They chronicle the successive 
organizations and varying costume of the Spirit, 
not its essential growth. It would not be difficult 
to trace through all these centuries of revolution 
and misrule, of strife and oppression, of theological 
hatred and priestly persecution, the secret wind- 
ings and subtle ramifications of a sacred artery, a 
spiritual aorta, connecting the heart of Christen- 
dom with its uttermost fibres, and filled with the 
blood of Christ. It would not be difficult to show 
that each century in turn has eaten of the flesh of 
the Son of Man, and had his life, however latent, 
abiding in it. And in this our day, amid all the 
indifference and supineness, the scepticism and 
the scorn, the madness and the crime, which meet 
and appall us on every hand, it would not be diffi- 
cult to discover unmistakable signs of deeper ear- 
nestness and truer devotion, of a more thorough 
penetration and occupation of this age by the spirit 
of Christ, than any past time has known. 

The only philosophy of history which satisfies 
mind and heart is optimism,—the belief that all 
things tend to good and produce good in the final 
result; and that if—din the lofty language of 


94 THE WAY OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY. 


Leibnitz — “we were sufficiently acquainted with 
the order of the universe, we should find that it 
surpasses all the wishes of the wisest, and that it 
could not be better than it is, not only for all in 
general but for ourselves in particular.” Chris- 
tian history, especially, is studied to little purpose 
unless we learn from it the Christian lessons of 
patience and hope. It reveals not only an un- 
looked-for power of self-recovery in man through 
the agency of the Holy Spirit, and shows how 
impossible it is for God to withdraw or man to 
drive that Spirit from the world, and what “a 
charméd life old goodness hath,’ and how the 
deeper shades of moral corruption appear so only 
through the light that limits them; but it also 
discloses to careful observation a steady progres- 
sion in good hitherto, which points to a future 
better than this present and better than all the 
past, —a height and breadth of social development, 
a spiritual maturity of human kind, which secular 
philosophy concurs with divine revelation in pre- 
dicting, and to which both have assigned the au- 
gust title, “City of God.” 


IV 


THE WAY OF HISTORIC ATONEMENT. 


RELIGION wide as the widest outlook of 

the modern mind; a religion free as human 
thought, concurrent with reason, co-ordinate with 
science; a religion in which the present predomi- 
nates over the past, and the future over the present ; 
in which judgment tops authority and vision out- 
runs tradition, — this is the instant demand of a 
liberal faith. 

Two ways appear of meeting this demand, two dis- 
tinct postures of the mind toward it, among those 
who equally urge the claim. The one undertakes to 
supplant, the other seeks to unfold. The former 
renounces, and declares its independence of, ecclesi- 
astic and historic Christianity ; disallows its heredi- 
tary title, and rejects all claim of its record to any 
admissions which conflict with the every-day expe- 
rience of men, which offend the sensuous under- 
standing, or transcend the methods of science. It 
culls from the sifted gospel some golden grains of 
ethical import, and embodies these in a theory of 
life and man which may or may not, according to 
circumstances, call itself Christianity, but which 


96 THE WAY OF HISTORIC ATONEMENT. 


claims to be its essence, and offers itself to the 
Church as such. 

The other position respects the claim of ecclesi- 
astic continuity, and seeks in Christianity itself, — 
in historic Christianity,—a meaning and a pur- 
pose so wide as to throw its orbit outside of the 
most elliptical radicalisms that traverse its spheres : 
as the sun, which seemed to the early Copernicans 
stationary, is judged by, sidereal astronomy to 
have an orbit of its own, which includes the aphe- 
lia of all the comets; and not only so, but carries 
them with it in its grander sweep. 

It is not pretended that this comprehensiveness 
lay in the conscious thought of the apostles and 
first teachers of Christianity ; enough to suppose 
that it lay in the mind of the Spirit which edited 
the gospel out of the deep of its own idea. Of this 
supposition there is and can be, in the nature of 
things, no positive proof. Those who adopt it may, 
with the easy self-deception of speculative zeal, un- 
wittingly transfer to the gospel a conceit of their 
own engendering. And certainly the Christianity 
of those who conjure into it whatever their fancy 
affects, is quite as arbitrary in one way as, in an- 
other, the Christianity of those who conjure out 
of it whatever their fancy distastes. The plus 
and minus are equally wide of the truth. 

But who shall undertake to say, on historical and 


ie 
" 
.§ 


THE WAY OF HISTORIC ATONEMENT. 97 


critical grounds, precisely how much or how little lay 
in those utterances of the early Church which have 
come down to us, and what were the absolute limits 
of their vision? In the writings of St. Paul there 
are indications of a mind that out-travelled the per- 
ceptions of his contemporaries, and saw in Chris- 
tianity a possible solution of quite other problems 
than the rehabilitation of the Jewish State. The 
thoughtful reader, in some of these Epistles, and es- 
pecially in that to the Romans, comes upon traces 
of an intellectual survey which took in a good deal 
more than the civil world of that time. St. Paul 
was the first interpreter of Christ, who seems to 
have divined his historic significance. To the 
Palestinian apostles the Christ was but the fulfil- 
ment of the hope of Israel. To the author of the 
fourth Gospel he was only a bodied Word, a de- 
monstration of godhead on a spiritual plane for 
spiritual ends. Paul brought Christianity down 
from heaven to earth, as Socrates did philosophy, 
and brought it out of the little sanctum of Judaism 
into the broad scene of the nations. Christianity, 
in his view, was the universal mediator, the re- 
organizer of universal history. A Jew by descent, 
but a citizen of the world in his new-born conscious- 
ness, he credited the gospel with cosmopolitan 
aims. And one of those aims, — the one which in- 
cludes all others, — he expressed by a term which is 
7 


’ 98 THE WAY OF HISTORIC ATONEMENT. 


rendered “atonement” in our English version of 
the text. This brave English word, in its literal 
and etymological sense, is itself a contribution to 
theology to be received with all thankfulness. No 
modern language, that I am aware of, possesses a 
word of precisely the same import. Nay, the word 
“atonement,” I suppose, though it seems presumpt- 
uous and sounds paradoxical to say so, expresses 
more exactly than even the original Greek the 
essential point in Paul’s doctrine of reconciliation. 
It expresses the result of that process of which the 
original Greek and the corresponding word in other 
versions suggest the method. 

Atonement is one of those ideas which have 
snffered much belittling in ecclesiastical hands. It 
has never, since Paul’s day, had justice done to it 
in systems of theology. Theologians, especially 
Protestant theologians, have belittled the idea by 
a capital misconception, which makes atonement a 
private concern of the individual soul, a private ad- 
justment of the soul with God. Nothing could be 
more foreign to Paul’s view and the views of the 
early Church, nothing more foreign to the spirit of 
the gospel, than Calvin’s idea of “ Particular Re- 
demption.” Paul,if I rightly conceive him, would 
have utterly repudiated such an idea ; — a redemp- 
tion determined by personal favoritism,—a re- 
demption accorded to a favored few, himself 


THE WAY OF HISTORIC ATONEMENT. 99 


being one of the few, and denied to the rest of man- 
kind. He who wrote, ‘‘I could wish that myself 
were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my 
kinsman according to the flesh,” was not likely to 
limit the grace of God by personal preference, or 
to put selection in the place of the election which 
he taught. That election itself he saw to be only 
initial, and neutralized by the new dispensation: 
“‘ Blindness in part hath happened to Israel until 
the fulness of the Gentiles be come in, and then 
all Israel shall be saved. For God hath concluded 
them all in unbelief, that he might have mercy 
upon all.” . 

The error of particular redemption, like so many 
others in theology, has arisen from the transference 
of the operation and fruits of the atonement from 
this earthly world to a life beyond the grave. 
The antichristian absurdity of such a redemption 
appears the moment the doctrine is applied to 
human life. The atonement comtemplated by 
Paul is no private privilege, and no transmundane 
acquisition ; but a public grace, of which the in- 
dividual becomes partaker through his social re- 
lations and not by private negotiation, and the 
realization of which is society itself in the measure 
of its moral and Christian progress. 

The apostle, cherishing the analogy of Judaism, 
connects this idea with that of sacrifice in the death 


100 THE WAY OF HISTORIC ATONEMENT. 7 


of Christ, — whether in the way of cause and effect, 
or of typical demonstration and ecclesiastical par- 
allelism, we need not stop to inquire. The idea 
of sacrifice is an ineradicable element in religion, 
and could not fail to be retained as an image and 
object of contemplation when it ceased to be a rit- 
ual function. The Church of Rome has made the 
image itself a part of its ritual, in the elevation of 
the host; that is, in the presentation by the priest 
to the worshipping assembly of a wafer which rep- 
resents the host or victim offered for man in the 
person of Christ. By the daily repetition of this 
pantomimic sacrifice, the Church of Rome symbo- 
lizes the perpetuity of that atonement which is not 
a single but a constant operation of the one sacri- 
fice which, as the writer to the Hebrews says, Christ 
offered once for ever. In that dumb show, when 
the priest at the tinkling of the bell uplifts the sa- 
cred monstrance, according to the theory of Roman 
symbolism, the breach that sundered heaven and 
earth is momentarily evened, and God and man are 
atoned. 

Rome symbolizes the perpetuity of the atone- 
ment in the ecclesiastical sense of sacrifice for sin ; 
but, not divining its deeper sense and its applica- 
tion to human society, Rome has failed to represent 
what is more important than its perpetuity, — viz., 
its progressiveness. A progressive reconciliation 


‘ 


THE WAY OF HISTORIC ATONEMENT. 101 


of the earthly and heavenly in human life, —a 
mutual interpenetration of the two, — this I con- 
ceive to be the real import of the doctrine of 
atonement. An historic process, not a theological 
device, is what I find in it. 

The general formula of earthly and heavenly 
includes many opposites, or supposed opposites, 
which constitute accordingly the several topics of 
atonement, — natural and supernatural, finite and 
infinite, temporal and eternal, God and man, the 
Church and the world, mortal and immortal. It 
is the tendency of false religion, in all dispensa- 
tions, to emphasize and magnify these antagonisms. 
A true religion tends to harmonize them. There- 
fore we say, “The atonement in Christ ;” inas- 
much as the reconciliation of these antitheses is 
the consummation of the Christian idea. I select 
for present consideration one or two of the more 
significant. 


I. Natural and supernatural. The antagonism 
here is not in the thing, but in the thought. It is 
a classification, under these two heads, of ordinary 
and extraordinary phenomena and powers. The 
term “natural” is used to denote the stated and 
intelligible facts of human experience, — those 
which have been investigated, referred to known 


agencies, and ranged under formulas which we 


102 THE WAY OF HISTORIC ATONEMENT. 


call laws. Together they constitute the “System 
of Nature,” so called ; which of course can mean 
nothing more than our observation or systematiza- 
tion of Nature. The system is in us, and not in 
the things themselves. Whatever transcends these 
familiar experiences, — facts which are not em- 
braced in this system, and seem not to tally with 
it, — are either denied, or classed as “supernatural.” 
They are denied by those who cannot tolerate that 
their little system, with which so much pains has 
been taken, should be proved imperfect by facts 
or alleged facts which it will not take in. It is 
the feeling of the child who fancies he has made a 
perfect figure with the bits of ivory in his Chinese 
puzzle, and subsequently discovers that one of the 
seven pieces has been left out. He would fain 
suppress the refractory piece. It is certainly more 
agreeable to question the facts, than to entertain the 
suspicion of the “ more things in heaven and earth” 
of which the poetspeaks. Nor is any thing gained, 
that I can see, by admitting the facts, so long as 
they are excluded from the sphere of Nature, to 
which humanity with its destinies belong. The 
term “supernatural” supposes two distinct agen- 
cies, Nature and God; that is, it separates Nature 
from God, —it makes Nature godless, — and so in- 
troduces into the scheme of religion a dualism 
which is Manichean and antichristian. The prog- 





THE WAY OF HISTORIC ATONEMENT. 103 


ress of Christian thought willabolish this dualism, 
will teach that the ordinary and extraordinary in 
human affairs are equally natural and equally di- 
vine. All phenomena are natural, and all causes 
that produce them are natural. A genuine miracle 
would be the most natural of all; it would be Na- 
ture in her immediateness, Nature unveiled, with- 
out the illusion of statedness which so befogs poor 
human wit, and stands instead of Nature in the 
vulgar mind. ‘The spirit is Nature’s innermost life: 
he who has most of it is most natural. Who so 
natural as Jesus? The miracles recorded of him 
are proofs of his naturalness. Suppose them myth- 
ical, they would still in a certain sense be illustra- 
tions of it, as legitimate impressions of his great 
nature on contemporary minds. Whoever shall 
attain to the same spirituality will experience that 
rapport with the central Power which the record 
ascribes to Jesus; he will have that sympathy 
with the universal Will, that shall make all things 
possible which seem desirable. If miracles show 
themselves in him, they will be the most natural 
things which he does. In proportion as men grow 
towards spiritual maturity, it will come to be seen 
that there is but one power in the greatest and in 
the least, — in the resurrection of the dead and the 
shooting of a grain of wheat. In the fulness of 
that spiritual maturity the godless distinctions of 





104. THE WAY OF HISTORIC ATONEMENT. 


false religion will be done away, and natural and 7 
supernatural] be atoned. 


II. God and man. Religion begins with a huge 
separation between these two. In its barbarous 
stage, where it takes the form of fetishism, that 
with which man has least sympathy is most likely 
to serve him as God. His god must be a fright to 
command his homage. A monster will answer 
that purpose better than a human model of power 
and goodness. He will sooner bow to a crocodile 
or misshapen stone than to any fellow of his tribe. 
And so, at the other end of the spiritual line, 
monotheism in its earlier forms, Hebrew mono- 
theism, determined an absolute separation, an im- 
passable gulf, between God and man. God was 
in heaven, and man on the earth: the only relation 
between them was legislation on one side and sub- 
jection on the other; arbitrary exaction there, un- 
conditional obedience here; commandment above 
and fear below, and burning and thundering Sinai 
between. Theology before the Christian era had 
outgrown this view, and sought to correct it with 
the notion of a second God, not quite so distant as 
the awful first, —a kind of prime minister of the 
Majesty on high, intermediate between Him and 
this earthly world. The Christian Church took up 
the idea, applied it to Christianity, and turned it 


THE WAY OF HISTORIC ATONEMENT. 105 


about and about, and worked it this way and that 
way, to see if a bridge could be made of it to span the 
supposed gulf between Godand man. The attempt 
was a failure: the bridge would not reach. If the 
second God is acreature, asthe Arians affirmed, there 
was still a gulf between him and the first. If he isno 
creature, but consubstantial, “‘ very God of very 
God,” as the Athanasians claimed, then there is a 
gulf between him and man. Say with Apollinaris, 
that he took the place in Jesus of the human soul ; 
then Jesus was no man at all, but God appearing 
ina human form. Say with Theodore of Mopsues- 
tia, that God was united to a genuine human in- 
dividual in Christ; and the statement, if analyzed, 
can mean no more than that God was associated 
with Jesus and co-operated with him, — both unit- 
ing in one effect: which is true enough, but if pre- 
dicated of Christ alone constitutes no substantial 
union of God with man, and leaves human nature 
where it was before. Practically, the second God 
is no nearer to man than the first. The gulf is 
still unbridged. The Holy Spirit which proceeds 
from both might supply the missing link, were it 
not that the Holy Spirit is conceived by one party 
as a priestly charm, by another as a fitful gust from 
the heavenly shore. Neither the second God nor 
the third can quite reach to bridge the gulf. The 
Trinity sits throned on high, — man grovels be- 


106 THE WAY OF HISTORIC ATONEMENT. ; 


low. Theology can mediate no real union between 
the human and divine. 

What theology did not finish, religion had already 
found in the consciousness of Christ. “I am in 
the Father, and the Father in me.” ‘“ He that hath 
seen me hath seen the Father.” “I and the Fa- 
ther are one.” Here is no doctrine, but a human 
experience. To make theological capital of such 
language, to coin this high utterance into dogma, 
is almost a sin against the Holy Ghost. It is no 
dogma, but the ecstasy of religion; which, as we saw, 
having begun with the widest separation of the 
human and divine, ends with declaring the absolute 
union of the two. What Jesus affirms of himself 
he prophesies and implores for all his followers: 
“As thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that 
they may be one inus.” Theology has never done 
justice to this saying, has never fairly faced it, has 
never dared to appropriate its awful import. The 
contrast between the idea of humanity one with 
God, and the actual world of any past time, has 
seemed so monstrous, that the words have remained 
a dead letter as to any serious application of their 
import. The world, no doubt, is very godless ; 
society everywhere far below the Christian ideal, — 
yet somewhat less so than in ages past. Assuredly 
the humanities have made some progress. The re- 
lief of want, the instruction of ignorance, the re- 


~ 


THE WAY OF HISTORIC ATONEMENT. 107 


form of vice, are more and more objects of care and 
effort in Christian society. And these humanities 
are also divinities. All agencies and organizations 
based on purely moral ideas, and working in the 
spirit of faith and love for moral ends, are the 
very presence and inworking of God in society. 
Thus God progressively incarnates himself in hu- 
man life; and thus human life, with progressive 
edification, builds itself up into God. In the 
measure in which these agencies accomplish their 
design ; in the measure in which sin and wrong are 
weeded out of the walks of men, in which the law 
of love asserts its sway and extends its empire over 
human life, in which the face of society conforms 
to the image of Christ,—in that measure the 
atonement proceeds until God and man are one; 
one not only in community of purpose and identity 
of will, but one in the consciousness of mutual, 
perfect, and unchangeable love. ‘‘ All mine are 
thine, and thine are mine,” “ thou in me and I in 
thee,” must be the confession, must express the 
consciousness of collective humanity, if the king- 
dom of heaven is any thing more than a Jewish 
chimera or a waking dream. 


III. As the greater includes the less, the union 
of God and man involves the resolution of all the 
other antitheses named; and especially that of 


108 THE WAY OF HISTORIC ATONEMENT. 


temporal and spiritual, or the Church and the 
world. The line of that division bisects all relig- 
ions and civilizations hitherto. The more imma- 
ture, the more crude and idolatrous the faith of an 
age or people, the more it has emphasized and 
organized this dualism. In the elder faiths it de- 
veloped an hereditary priesthood and a hieratic 
government, and culminated in the deification of 
the spiritual function ; as witnessed to this day in 
the twice-born Brahman of India, and the Khu- 
bilai Khan or Lama-God of Thibet. The separa- 
tion of sacred and profane in human life bears an 
inverse ratio to the progress of religion. ‘The ruder 
the religion, the wider the separation. 

The genius of Christianity, as shown in the 
Gospels, is wholly and gloriously adverse to such 
separations. While it sanctifies the world, it secu- 
larizes the Church, and looks to the doing away of all 
distinction between the two. Jesus was emphati- 
cally aman of the world. The daily walks of men 
were familiar to his feet ; their daily joys and sor- 
rows, and all their wants, familiar to his heart. 
When he went to the marriage feast, he went as a 
wedding guest, and brought his own contribution, 
material as well as moral, to the general joy. When 
he went among publicans and sinners, he sat at their 
tables without reserve, and shrank from no contact 
with the daughters of vice. Religion might flaunt 


' 


THE WAY OF HISTORIC ATONEMENT. 109 


her sanctimonies, — he wore no phylactery but his 
native holiness; he suffered no sabbath to check 
his humanity, and no tradition to bound his free- 
dom. The genius of Christianity abhors profes- 
sional sanctity ; it abhors a priestly caste. 

But the genius of Christianity is one thing ; its 
historic envelopment, another. Christendom hast- 
ened to establish a priesthood; the priesthood 
hastened to invest itself with exclusive and magical 
powers. Professional Christianity hastened to sep- 
arate its holies from the profane world. Into the 
desert and into the cell, into sackcloth and cowl, 
went all the religion, and starved and scourged 
and tormented itself, until piety and penance were 
synonymous terms, and a wasted, woe-begone fig- 
ure, bending over a death’s-head or clasping a cru- 
cifix, became the exponent and symbol of devo- 
tion. With equal zeal, in the opposite direction, 
the secular interest hastened to withdraw from the 
ghastly presence of the sons of God. Into the sad- 
dle and into the field and into the pirate ship, into 
violence and blood and lawless rapine, rushed the 
godless outside world, and knew no religion but 
the most external, — passive reception of sacra- 
ments that kept the Devil, who was also external, 
at bay. 

All through the centuries of the middle age, this 
sheer separation of the spiritual and temporal pre- 


110 THE WAY OF HISTORIC ATONEMENT. 


vailed. } Religion was a specialty, a distinct profes- 
sion, nowise incumbent on the world atlarge. The 
very word became a synonyme of separation, — as 
in Southern Europe to this day a religious person 
denotes amonk ora nun. The institution of chiv-— 
alry was a kind of mediation between these ex- 
tremes. When martial prowess was married to 
saintly devotion, when the swordsman became a 
missionary of righteousness, a limit was set to the 
reign of brute force on the one hand, and of ghostly 
pretension on the other. This beautiful growth of 
the middle age is the type of a still continuing me- 
diation between the Church and the world, -rep- 
resented in our day by practical philanthropy 
and social reform. For still the separation contin- 
ues,— in Protestant Christendom still continues. 
Religion is still a specialty, a distinct concern. 
A sharply dividing line, in most Protestant sects, 
distinguishes with superior holiness the sheep of 
the inner communion from the necessary but un- 
sanctified goats of the outer fold. These distinc- 
tions, whatever their value in view of the present 
state and stage of Christian culture, are neverthe- 
less proofs of an immature Church and imperfect 
atonement. ‘“ When that which is perfect is come, 
then that which is in part shall be done away.” 
The Church as at present interpreted, is a partial- 
ity ; religion, as now understood, is a partiality : par- 


THE WAY OF HISTORIC ATONEMENT. 111 


tialities which are providential, indispensable hith- 
erto; the abolition or disuse of which would only 
leave us the opposite partialities of worldliness and 
irreligion uncorrected and unchecked. Better that 
the Church and the world, spiritual and temporal, 
business and religion, should stand opposed to each 
other as now, than that the world and its tempo- 
ralities should stand alone, and Church and religion 
have no standing. Nevertheless, it must not be 
forgotten that the perfect state is the interpenetra- 
tion of these opposites ; that the true Church is 
society informed by the Spirit of God ; that true re- 
ligion is the health of the spirit manifest in healthy 
and beneficent action. All other religion, — relig- 
ion that detaches itself from the business of life, — 
however commended by saintly precept and illus- 
trated by saintly example, is disease, or at best a 
provisional experience. The sanctities of man are 
not his separations, but his communications ; and, 
as language itself instructs us, holiness and whole- 
hess are one. Atonement will not be complete un- 
til the distinction of sacred and profane, temporal 
and spiritual, business and religion, the Church 
and the world, is practically neutralized ; until 
these dislecations of human nature are healed, 
these severed parts and processes atoned in one 
undivided and absolute life. 


112 JHE WAY OF HISTORIC ATONEMENT. 


IV. That absolute life, that mighty solvent in 
which flesh and spirit are resolved, and natural and 
supernatural fused in one, —shall it not also fuse 
and resolve the last and longest contradiction of 
time, the contradiction of mortal and immortal, the 
here and the hereafter, earth and heaven in the 
local sense of those terms? ‘ The last enemy that 
shall be put under is death.” The apostle who 
wrote thus had a vision of a state in which death 
should be no more. The popular belief transfers 
that state from this human earth to some unknown 
region beyond; and Christians talk of “‘ going to 
heaven”? in much the same way that the ancients 
talked of going to the place of departed souls: 
with this exception, that the going in the one case is 
a going up, in the other it was a going down; but 
with this advantage on the side of the ancients, 
that they had a distinct conception of the where- 
abouts of their imaginary world, and the route 
by which it was reached. Isee no reason for this 
translocation; no reason for supposing that the 
sphere of planetary attraction ceases with the dis- 
solution of the animal frame ; no reason for suppos- 
ing that the planet’s hold of its own is bounded by 
_ the animal life. On the contrary, it accords with 
reason to believe that the soul— which makes the 
individual, and which must not be confused with 
the accompanying spirit, which is not individual — 


THE WAY OF HISTORIC ATONEMENT. 1138 


is a part of the planetary life, and can never, while 
that life endures, be divorced from the system to 
which it belongs. 

It may be that the human body, without the in- 
tervention of death, will one day become so ethere- 
alized as to be impervious to death, — will become 
death-proof ; that in this way mortal will put on 
immortality. However this may be, I am per- 
suaded that dying is not migration, that this earth 
is man’s future and eternal abode, and that in the 
course of human development the time will come 
when death shall no longer occupy the place it now 
does in the human economy ; but, if in any sense it 
continues to be, will be practically, as an enemy, 
put under. In the final and consummate atone- 
ment, this last antagonism of mortal and immortal, 
earth and heaven, will be atoned. There will be no 
talk then of “going to heaven,” as in the Gospel 
there is no such word. We do not go to heaven, 
but heaven comes to us. They whose inner eye 
is opened see heaven, and they who see it are in it, 
and the air to them is thick with angels, like the 
background of Raphael’s “ Mother in glory.” 


I have dwelt on those topics of atonement which 
seemed to me most significant, and which best 
illustrate the practical working and thoroughness 


of the great historic process. It might seem that 
8 


114 THE WAY OF HISTORIC ATONEMENT. 


the survey should embrace, among other adjust- 


ments, the reconciliation of science and religion, 
—the two interests which divide the mental 
life of the age, and whose growing antagonism 
has been to many good people a source of uneasi- 
ness in recent time. But this antagonism belongs 
rather to the realm of thought than to that of 
actual life, with which our view of the atonement 
is mainly concerned. As such, it is properly in- 
cluded in that of natural and supernatural. 

The opposition of science and religion is discre- 
pance of method, rather than contrariety of aim. 
Both are ministers of social well-being, and there- 
fore co-agents in the work of atonement; for 
whatever promotes the general well-being is an 
agent in that work. Both seek the good of society, 
but in ways how different! The one by unfolding 
and applying the laws of Nature; the other by 
revealing and applying the laws of the soul. The 
one by facilitating social converse ; the other by 
ennobling its quality. The one by evening physi- 
cal obstructions and extending the material com- 
forts of life; the other by eradicating moral evils 
and deepening the import and consciousness of life 
into life everlasting. Both look to human well- 
being; both, if genuine, end there. But here is 
the rub! The action and success of religion depend 
on certain ideas and beliefs which science, if it 


THE WAY OF HISTORIC ATONEMENT. 115 


does not impugn, mistrusts and discredits, because 
unable to verify them by its own methods, — 
methods approved in its own domain. Such ideas 
as Providence, Revelation, or God in history, Im- 
mortality, — nay, the idea of a God, in any proper 
sense of the word,—is out of the domain of 
science, and is only admitted, if at all, on the 
ground of the moral sense. 

The stupendous successes of science in her own 
dominion have emboldened her to claim jurisdic- 
tion over territory not amenable to physical au- 
thority, and to war against dynasties that sit 
“on no precarious throne, nor borrow leave to be.” 
Religion acknowledges with all thankfulness the 
share in the atonement which science may right- 
fully claim,— her mediatorial agency in the sensi- 
ble world, where her ministry is always a ministry 
of reconciliation, smoothing the hostilities, adjust- 
ing the alienations, yoking the contrary forces, com- 
pelling the antagonisms of Nature, and stretching 
the electric cord of intelligence from city to city, 
and from land to land, across all solitudes and 
under all deeps. Subsidizing for that purpose the 
swiftest of material agents, by a kind of earthly 
omnipotence, she compels the lightnings to be our 
couriers, and drives them by the wondrous road 
she has built for their journeyings along “the 
bottom of the monstrous world,” where, since the 


116 THE WAY OF HISTORIC ATONEMENT. : 


birth of time, no sentient heart ever beat, no voice 
ever broke the eternal silence, no thought ever 
penetrated but the omnipresent thought of God! 
‘Through those untrodden and sunless realms a 
road has been built for the lightnings to go upon 
and to carry intelligence and conscious thought and 
purpose, and tidings of war and peace, and solemn 
greetings, across the unsympathizing vastness, virtu- 
ally annihilating the hostile element, and so fulfill- 
ing the prophecy, that there be “no more sea.” 
Religion accepts with all thankfulness the me- 
diations of science; but religion will not suffer 
science to dictate her beliefs, or to strike from her 
creed whatever the text-books fail to explain. 
When M. Renan declares it to be an absolute rule 
of criticism to admit no miracle in history, because 
the condition of a miracle is faith, religion is con- 
tent that men should render to Criticism the things 
which are Criticism’s, and to Faith the things 
which are Faith’s. But when he insists that “ the 
faith of humanity” rests on a fancy of Mary Mag- 
dalene, religion can but smile at the huge incon- 
sistency which, seeking to escape an improbability, 
tumbles into a tenfold greater, and which sacrifices 
the real order of Nature to an idol so named. Of 
the real order of Nature, the first principle is, that 
every effect must have an adequate cause. The 
Christian Church was founded in the belief of the 


THE WAY OF HISTORIC ATONEMENT. 117 


resurrection of Christ. What was the cause of 
that belief? To rest the growth of ages on a 
woman’s delusion, is a greater invasion and in- 
version of the order of Nature than any miracle 
recorded in the New Testament. It is one of the 
mistakes of the time, to overrate the authority of 
physical science, whose judgments are valid only 
on purely material ground, and lose their conclu- 
Siveness when a spiritual factor intervenes. To 
deny the spiritual factor is the instinct of science, 
but also her weakness ; an unconscious confession 
of her own limitation, which many mistake for the 
limit of truth. In the world of phenomena, science 
is queen ; in the world of causes, she is a bungler 
and an alien. It is only within her proper and 
bounded domain of physical inquiry that she can 
claim to be interpreter of the methods of God. It 
has been said that religion has no function “ which 
may not be discharged by science.” If so, let us 
hasten to make up for lost time, for wasted hours 
of worship, since the foundation of the world. 
Let us straightway convert our temples into lecture- 
rooms. Cease idle prayers, cease drivelling praise! 
Henceforth let the weekly holy-day be devoted to 
scientific investigations. Let the children of the 
Sunday-school repeat for litany the multiplication- 
table instead of the Lord’s Prayer. Let anatom- 
ical and physiological demonstrations replace the 


118 THE WAY OF HISTORIC ATONEMENT. 


broken body of the Eucharist and the waters of 
baptism. Let font and chalice be sent to the 
curiosity-shop, and shelved with Chinese joss- 
sticks and hideous Indian gods. Vanish, ye dim 
surmises of a supersensuous world! Vanish the 
Holy Ghost! Let serviceable gases entertain the 
well-spent hour! 

Science can do much; but there are functions 
of religion which cannot be discharged by science. 
Not yet has science succeeded to the throne of God 
in the heart of mankind. We are no nearer to 
God in our knowledge than in our ignorance, 
unless to the knowledge of Nature be added the 
knowledge of spiritual truth. On the contrary, 
without the spiritual complement, the more scien- 
tific, the more atheistic. Science can do much; 
but there are straits in life where science can afford 
neither counsel nor aid. Standing by the bedside 
of his dying mother, says a German humorist, “ I 
thought over all the great and little inventions of 
man, — the doctrine of souls, Newton’s system of 
attraction, the Universal German Library, the Gren- 
era Plantarum, the Magister Matheseos, the Caleu- 
lus Infinitorium, the right and oblique ascension of 
the stars and their parallaxes. But nothing would 
answer. And she lay out of reach, lay on the 
brink, and was going; and I could not even see 
where she would fall. Then I commended her to 


THE WAY OF HISTORIC ATONEMENT. {19 


God, and went out and composed a prayer for the 
dying, that they might read it to her. She was 
my mother, and had always loved me so dearly ; 
and this was all I could do for her. ... We are 
not great, and our happiness is, that we can believe 
in something greater and better.” 

I said there are two ways of meeting the demand 
for a truly liberal and rational religion; — two 
ways of meeting, but only one way of solving, the 
problem. Not in the way of denial, but of faith, 
the solution must come,if at all. Faith in Christ 
as the type of consummate humanity ; faith in hu- 
manity as prefigured in Christ; faith in God as 
humanity’s fulness and justification ; faith in reason 
as God’s interpreter; faith in revelation as reason’s 
consummate flower; faith in society as ever-pro 
gressive realization of reason and of God, —is not 
this the desired solution? 

The Christian confession need not bound our 
religious sympathy. All religions that devoutly 
aspire, all religions that diligently labor, all relig- 
ions that minister to human weal, deserve our 
sympathy and claim ou’ respect. But Christian- 
ity is more than religion; it is history’s highway, 
humanity’s thoroughfare. The paths that diverge 
from it will return to it again, or lose themselves 
in nothingness. Whatever dissents from it is par- 
tiality and limitation ; in it is wholeness, and the 
widest vision, and the largest liberty. 





Vv 
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THEISM. 


A GLANCE at the world acquaints us with the 
prevalence of worship, consequently of some 
conception of Deity, in human society. 

We cannot indeed say what used to be said, 
what Plutarch and Cicero so confidently affirmed, 
that belief in God is found wherever man is found. 
A better-informed ethnology contradicts that asser- 
tion. There are certainly peoples in whose life, if 
travellers report them truly, this element is alto- 
gether wanting. The natives of the valley of La 
Plata and of Paraguay, according to Azara, were 
entirely destitute of any religious beliefs or rites 
when he travelled among them. ‘The missionaries 
who visited those tribes, supposing that they must 
have some sort of religion, took for idols the figures 
carved upon their pipes and bowls, and burned 
those implements accordingly. Others, seeing them 
beat the air on the appearance of the new moon, 
imagined that they worshipped that luminary. 
‘“‘But the positive fact is,” says Azara, “that they 





THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THEISM. 121 


worship nothing in the world, and have absolutely 
no religion.” 3 

According to Crantz, the Greenlanders had no 
religious ceremonies, and exhibited no sign of re- 
ligious life. Schoolcraft describes the Camanches 
as equally godless. 

Sir John Lubbock has accumulated a mass of 
testimony to the same effect from travellers in 
regions inhabited by savage tribes. M. Bik in- 
quired of the Arafuras what power they invoked 
in time of need when their fishing vessels were 
overtaken by storm, and no human aid could save. 
The answer was, that they knew not on whom to 
call in such straits; did he know? and would he 
be so good as to inform them? The Zulu chief 
when he heard of God would transfix him with his 
spear. ‘And yet this was a man whose judgment 
on other subjects would command attention.” Very 
pathetic is the Kaffir’s confession: “I ask myself, 
Who has touched the stars with his hands? on 
what hills do they rest? The waters are never 
weary ; they know no other law than to flow with- 
out ceasing from morning till night, and from night 
till morning; but where do they rest, and who 
makes them flow? The clouds come and go, and 
burst in water over the earth; whence come they, 


1 See “ Voyages,” II. 8, 187. Quoted by Schelling, Philosophie 
der Mythologie, 73. 


122 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THEISM. 


and who sends them? . . . I cannot see the wind; 
what is it, and who makes it blow? . . . Do I know 
how the corn sprouts? Yesterday there was not a 
blade in my field; to-day I returned and found 
some. Who can have given to the earth the wis- 
dom and the power to produce it? Then I buried 
my face in both my hands.” 

These exceptions do not disprove an innate ten- 
dency to worship in man; they only show that this 
tendency is not always active, that certain condi- 
tions are required for its manifestation. Its state 
of abeyance in the South American savage no more 
disproves its existence in him, than its state of sus- 
pension disproves its existence in the secularist or 
unbeliever of Christian lands. Still Cicero’s asser- 
tion, that no people is so rude as not to have some 
notion of Deity, must be taken with this qualifica- 
tion, that religion is usually found in the savage 
state, and always in civil society. 

We may say, then, that belief in Deity is natural 
to man; is one of the primary forces of the soul. 

The origin of this belief is a question of wide 
dispute. The “fecit timor” of the atheist poet, the 
“notio insita’”? of Cicero, the original-revelation 
theory of Cudworth and later divines, represent 
the range of opinion concerning it. .Hume was the 
first to distinguish between the “foundation in 
reason’ and the “origin in human nature” of the 





THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THEISM. 123 


idea of God.! He supposes polytheism to have 
preceded monotheism in the course of human de- 
velopment. And this supposition is confirmed by 
ethnological research. On the other hand, a not 
unreasonable prejudice in Christian lands has 
leaned to the opposite view. Reasoning from 
our idea of God and the seeming necessities of 
human nature, one might presume that the Being 
of whom the knowledge is so essential would make 
Himself known to man in the beginning, that this 
knowledge would enter into Nature’s dower, would 
form a part of the primal outfit of human kind. 
And such has been the presumption of most Chris- 
tian writers who have treated this topic prior to 
Hume. They have held that the first of mankind 
were endowed with this saving knowledge; that a 
revelation of the Godhead was made to original 
man, which soon waxed dim, was gradually per- 
verted and finally lost; that all polytheisms — 
Indian, Pheenician, Grecian, and others—are dis- 
integrations and corruptions of an aboriginal mono- 
theism. 

To this hypothesis there are grave objections, 
not to speak of the a priori difficulty of supposing 
that so essential a good once possessed could be 
lost to all but a fraction of the human race. A 
revelation which could be so easily forfeited must 





1 Natural History of Religion, Introduction. 


124 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THEISM. q 


have been quite inadequate; and, if thus inade- 
quate, why bestowed? Why did not the God who 
gave it maintain it, or immediately replace it when 
lost? Polytheism is no more deducible from mono- 
theism by division and dissolution of unity, than 
monotheism, as some have maintained, is derivable 
from polytheism by concentration and absorption 
of the many into one. Each has its own independ- 
ent origin. 

Certain it is that history knows nothing of the 
primal revelation which this theory affirms. His- 
tory finds men in the earliest ages which its scru- 
tiny has yet reached, possessed with the crudest 
conceptions of Godhead, — the earlier, the cruder, 
the farther from the truth. It finds savage tribes 
or incipient nations involved in thick midnight of 
spiritual ignorance, blindly feeling after something 
divine. 

And yet if we inquire whence the thought, the 
presentiment of any thing divine to feel after, we 
shall have to admit some innate impression, some 
dim, instinctive sense of Deity, antecedent to even 
the most imbecile groping after God. So much 
must be conceded in order to account for the first 
and feeblest essays in that kind. An intimation of 
Deity ! implanted by Deity’s self in the human con- 
stitution. We cannot call it an idea, for ideas are 


1 “‘Notio Dei insita.” Cicero. 


THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THEISM. 125 


perceptions, and cannot be properly said to exist 
where the object is not consciously present to the 
subject. And yet it is something more than mere 
perceptivity ; it is preparation to perceive and the 
certainty of perceiving whenever the requisite con- 
ditions shall concur, — external suggestion and in- 
ternal demand. It is with the discovery of God as 
it is with the discovery of self. The infant has no 
idea of self, and yet that idea is sure to arise in the 
mind in due course of development. It is not com- 
municated from abroad, but generated within. It 
may therefore be said to pre-exist as impression 
before it exists as idea. 

The ancients, especially the Platonists, recog- 
nized this mental condition, and called it “ pro- 
lepsis,” anticipation. Cicero defines it as an 
antecedent notion,! requiring further development, 
and so applies it to the being of God. He speaks 
of a God who reposes in the notion of the mind? as 
in a track or impress he has made of himself. 

To civilized man the idea of God arrives with 
instruction, which does but fructify a pre-existing 
germ. Without instruction, the idea is certainly 
not developed in the individual mind with the same 


1 “Notionem appello quod Greci tum évyoiay tum xmpéaAnvw 
dicunt. Ea est insita et ante percepta cujusque forme cognitio 
enodationis indigens.” Topica 7. 

2 «“eus ille quem mente noscimus atque in animi notione tan- 
quam in vestigio volumus reponere.” De Nat. Deorum, I. 14. 


126 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THEISM. 7 


inevitableness with which the mind develops the — 
idea of self. But taking the whole of humanity, 
we may say that the idea of God is as proper to the 
race as that of self to the individual. A human 
being cast from infancy upon absolute solitude, 
might not have the idea of Divinity in any sense or 
shape awakened within him. If he did, it would in 
all likelihood be not the monotheistic idea, but 
some low form of polytheism or fetishism. Yet 
even that would be impossible without an innate 
aptitude for Theism in the soul. Without a pre- 
pared niche in human nature, no image occupying 
the place of Deity and receiving divine honors 
would ever have been set up. It is idle to talk of 
fear as possessing this deific power. Fear can 
make bugbears, but can never convert the bugbear 
into a God. The brute fears, but the brute knows 
no God. The brute shuns the object of its fear; in 
man there is a principle which, in spite of fear, im- 
pels him to draw near to some dreaded object with 
reverential homage. Fear alone would never do 
that. Fear alone would never have invented wor- 
ship. It may cringe, but not adore. 

The fact is, human nature, prior to all teaching, 
is conscious of a want which Deity alone can satisfy. 
It seeks its own complement when it prays; and 
were there not some affinity between the human 
and the divine, the soul would never have dreamed 


THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THEISM. 127 


so much as the wildest African dream of the un- 
known God. Human nature requires a God, and 
prior to all ‘teaching, with no guide but vague 
anticipation or unreasoning instinct, blindly gropes 
after something to fill that place in the soul which 
enlightened Theism fills in civilized man. 


Now where will this groping first alight? What 
being will man first embrace as divine? Will it be 
one of his own kind; some select individual emi- 
nently wise and good? Obviously not, for the 
reason that humanity lies too near. The savage 
knows it only in its weakness and imperfection. 
In the greatest of his tribe he sees only his like. 
But religion’s first impulse is to seek in God some- 
thing foreign and very different. For this, man is 
thrown upon irrational Nature. There he encoun- 
ters the unknown Power whose presence the rudest 
feels, and endeavors to fix before he is able to 
reason about it or to state it distinctly to himself. 
It is not that he infers an intelligent Maker from 
the wondrous works which meet his eye. That is 
the act of more advanced reason, to which the idea 
of God is already familiar. But he feels a Presence 
in Nature transcending human powers. That silent 
Presence which we all feel, and feel most pro- 
foundly in the deepest solitude, the feeling of 
which gave birth to Arcadian Pan, the instructed 


128 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THEISM. q 


monotheist refers to the one all-present God, the 
Maker and Father of all. The savage has no such 
idea, but he has the same feeling, and has it more 
intense. He is haunted by that felt Presence. In 
the heart of the forest, on the lonely shore, he feels 
that he is not alone, that very near him is a Greater ~ 
than himself. The Power that works in the pro- 
cesses of nature, that breathes in the wind, that 
drives the cloud, that roars in the thunder, that 
watches in the stars, — this unseen Power, his un- 
developed thought has not yet learned to general- 
ize. With him it is not the one pervading Spirit of 
whom and by whom are all things. He can only 
lay hold of it in particular phenomena; he must in- 
dividualize it, must vest it in some palpable object. 
And the more grotesque the object, the more ab- 
horrent to taste and reason, the more likely it is to 
stand for Deity in his conception, as appealing 
more forcibly to his imagination than nobler and 
comelier natures. Some misshapen tree or stone 
that caught his eye at some critical moment of 
danger or deliverance, of good or ill success, be- 
comes to him an object of adoration, which may or 
may not be adopted by the tribe. The tribe is 
more likely to fix on some monstrous or dangerous 
animal —a serpent, a crocodile, a tiger. 

There is no caprice in this, no wilful perversion 
or turning aside from the truth, no corruption of 


THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THEISM. 129 


degenerate humanity; but human nature in its 
first incipient aspirations, feeling after God, ‘if 
haply ” it “‘ may find him.” The history of religion 
begins in this way. This is the first, initial act of 
that spirit which sang the Hebrew litanies and 
dictated the “‘ Revelation of St. John the Divine.” 
This is what man first finds when he feels after 
God; he passes by the sun and stars and the up- 
right human form, and lights upon a serpent or a 
stone. These are objects which millions of human 
beings worship at this day. Nor are these monstros- 
ities altogether confined to savage tribes. Fetish- 
ism mingles with the rites of nations full-grown 
and refined. It is found in Egypt contempora- 
neous with the worship of Osiris and the splendors 
of Luxor and Thebes. It is found in Assyria in 
the palmiest days of Chaldean civilization. In the 
most magnificent of cities, in the most flourishing 
period of its history, the chief object of worship 
was a serpent,—not a carved symbol, but the 
living beast, — not as typifying any thing beyond 
itself, but as actually divine. Arnobius, a Chris- 
tian convert of the fourth century, relates that in 
Africa, where he resided, he never, before his con- 
version, saw a stone on which oil had been poured 
without paying it homage.! Stones smeared with 
oil and called “ Betyls” were among the earliest 


1 Ady. Gent. I. 39. 
9 


130 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THEISM. 


objects of devotion. The patriarch Jacob, grand- 
son though he was of the first-recorded monotheist, 
made a “betyl” of the stone which had served him 
for a pillow in the place where he dreamed the 
dream of the ladder reaching from heaven to earth. 
Aerolites were deemed by the ancients especially 
sacred. The world-famed temple of Diana at Eph- 
esus commemorated one of these meteoric stones.! 
The black stone of the Kaaba at Mecea is also, it is 
supposed, an aerolite. Devoutly kissed by annual 
thousands of Mussulman pilgrims, it remains to 
this day a relic-fetish in the midst of the purest 
monotheism. 


The next stage in the religion of Nature, still 
within the sphere of realism, is separated by a wide 
remove from the first in dignity and import, — 
Sabaism,” or more properly Astrolatry, the worship 
of the heavenly bodies. 

The most positive of natural phenomena, the 
most universal and appreciable of natural benefits, 
is light. It is no mere figure of speech to call it 
the “life” of the world. It is precisely that. The 
difference between light and no light to the eye 
is the difference between the visible all and noth- 


1 Avoretods, Acts xix. 35. 
2 According to Chwolsohn, the use of this term to designate a 
form of religion is incorrect. Die Ssabier. Vorrede, 19. 





THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THEISM. 181 


ing. Historically, it is the difference between crea- 
tion and no creation, between cosmos and chaos. 
Without it no vegetable, without it no animal, no 
organized life. Without it, — 


“The world was void: 
The populous and the powerful was a lump, 
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless; 
A lump of death, a chaos of hard clay.” 


The old astrolaters may not have had sight of 
the whole of the truth poetically imaged by Byron, 
and scientifically expounded by Moleschott and 
Tyndall; but they saw enough to satisfy them that 
light is the greatest of material benefactions. 
What wonder that the sun, the prime source of 
that light, should be worshipped as the prince of 
the heavenly powers, and the other luminaries, in 
their several degrees, as blessed and divine! 
“ Hail, holy Light,” is the matin song of religion 
emerging from the night of fetishism. Hallowed 
be sun and stars! and hallowed be fire, the earthly 
antitype of heavenly light and heat! Fire, the 
purifying power, from which the word “ pure” is 
derived, which separates the ethereal from the 
earthly, and re-unites it with its kindred sky! 
Fire, in its finished form of flame, expresses as- 
piration: it suggests the pyramid; may it not have 
suggested the earliest use of that structure? The 
pyramid is a petrified flame. 

But sun, stars, and fire are not the only benefac- 


182 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THEISM. 


tions of Nature. Thought pauses upon these as the 
most commanding ; but religion finds other kindred 
objects of devout contemplation. Holy, also, is the 
vaulted sky outstretched as a tent, the sun’s taber- 
nacle; holy the circumfluent air, the fitful winds, 
the stedfast earth. With the glowing appreciation 
of the powers of Nature, with the action of the 
plastic imagination upon them, they come in time 
to be personified and worshipped as personal 
agents: and so the next step in the progress of 
natural religion } is impersonation of natural powers 
resulting in mythology. Of this impersonation the 
hymns of the Rig-Veda represent the initial stage ; 
of this we have in the Osiris-cult? of ancient Egypt, 
the first fully developed mythology: Bramanism is 
its greatest social product ; Greek poetry and art, its 
noblest intellectual creations. 


One step farther brings us to the top and 
consummation of natural religion. The elements 
are great; the natural man renders them instinc- 
tive homage: but to cultivated, self-possessed 


1 Tuse this phrase in the sense of Nature-worship, not in the 
current sense of rational religion, which seems to me a misuse of 
the term. 

2 According to Bunsen, the Osiris-cult preceded Egyptian zool- 
atry ; but this can be true only of its adoption by the priesthood, 
not of its intellectual genesis. See Gott in der Geschichte, Vol 
IL 27. 





THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THEISM. 133 


thought there is something greater than these. 
Conscious intelligence, reason, —in a word, the 
rational soul, is more than sun or stars, or wind 
or flood. And the rational soul is man. Uncon- 
scious Nature is great; but man is greater. Not 
man as we commonly behold him, the drivel- 
ling imbecile of every-day life, but man as. poetic 
imagination apprehends him,— the ideal man, di- 
vested of earthly limitations and imperfections, 
superior to accident, unvexed by care, impregnable 
to fear, invulnerable, immortal, rejoicing in eternal 
youth. What image of Divinity can equal this? 
What impersonation of elemental powers, rude, 
Titanic, hundred-handed, can vie with this glorified 
human type? Surely, if there be gods, they must be 
diyine men. The Greeks saw this. They alone, 
or they first, of ancient nations— the Athenians 
especially, with their democratic leanings — per- 
ceived the import and worth of man, and embodied 
that perception in their divinities. They expressed 
it in two immortal myths; one retrospective, the 
other prospective. The first is the conquest of the 
Titans by the Olympians, “the younger gods;” the 
second is the Chained Prometheus. The former 
demonstrates the superiority of conscious intelli- 
gence over lawless, however gigantic, force, — cos- 
mos mastering chaos; the latter typifies the 
present abeyance, premonitory of the ultimate 


134 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THEISM. 


triumph, of humanity, — the triumph of right over 
will, of reason over fear, of the rational service of 
human kind over all religipn in which the moral 
principle is not supreme. 

We will call this last and highest stage of nat- 
ural religion Theanthropism. The Greco-Roman 
and the Scandinavian mythologies— Hellenism and 
Odinism—are its two historic examples. Thean- 
thropism is partly a development of the antecedent 
stage, — the impersonation of natural forces, — and 
partly the addition of a new element. The Greek 
divinities were mostly impersonations, but imper- 
sonations stamped with a human type and subor- 
dinated to it. Other religions had developed gods 
that were partly human. Such were the Crishna 
of the Mahabharatta and Egyptian Osiris. What 
distinguishes Hellenism is its preponderant human- 
ity. Indian and Egyptian worship still clung to 
the symbol, and often, in accommodation to the 
symbol, merged the human in the monstrous. 
Crishna appears with more than the human comple- 
ment of limbs, Osiris is figured with the head of a 
bird, Isis with that of a cow, in pictorial represen- 
tations. ‘The Egyptians had no such impression of 
the dignity of man as would make the human 
form the most fitting embodiment of Deity. The 
human was no more divine in their estimation than 
the brute, — was even less so, because more familiar, 





THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THEISM. 185 


less seemingly mysterious. It is an alien spirit that 
looks through the eye of the serpent and the ox, 
and, because alien, mysterious, unfathomable. The 
more alien, the more divine, in the apprehension of 
the pre-Hellenic world. With the Greek, on the 
contrary, the original symbol representing elemen- 
tal powers was merged in the human person, or 
retained only as adjunct and decoration, like the 
bow in the hands of Phebus, or the winged sandal 
on the feet of Hermes. Zeus, the divine imperso- 
nation of the sky, is a human being of immortal 
mould. He bears in Homeric verse the epithets of 
cloud-gatherer and thunder-rejoicing ; but the bolt 
in his right hand is the only visible sign which dis- 
tinguishes the god from the man. 

Moreover, the Greeks introduced a new element 
into religion,—the worship of actual historical 
characters, of departed worthies, heroes whose 
virtues had raised them to the level of the gods. 
This was something very different from the wor- 
ship of ancestors, of which traces appear in many 
of the ancient religions. That was a family rite, 


1 It may be objected that the Greek mythology differed from 
those of India and Egypt, not in its essence, but only in its artistic 
represertations ; that its human aspect is only a concession to the 
elaims of art, which abhors the monstrous. But art with the 
Greeks was the product of religion, and must be regarded as the 
exponent of pre-existing ideas. It represented conceptions which 
religion bad inspired. 


186 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THEISM. 


haying no connection with public worship, and 
therefore not in the line of that historic deyvelop- 
ment which I am tracing. The hero-worship of the 
Greeks and Romans was a part of that Theanthrop- 
ism which constitutes a distinctive feature of their 
religion. This I regard as the culmination of the 
natural religions; just as Christian Theanthropism, 
springing from a different root, is the culmination 
of the spiritual or “revealed.” To that different 
root let us now direct our attention. 





We have traced the progress of the idea of God 
in the way of natural religion through the several 
stages of Fetishism, Astrolatry, Impersonation of 
physical forces, and Theanthropism; God as terres- 
trial creature, God as celestial radiance, God as 
personified elemental power, and God as man. Ob- 
serve that these different conceptions, with only a 
partial exception in the case of the last, have one 
trait in common, one capital defect ; to wit, the ab- 
sence of that moral element which makes the dis- 
tinguishing feature, the very foundation, of those 
religions which we call “revealed.” Even in Hel- 
lenism, the moral element is found only as an inci- 
dental trait, like the chastity of Artemis and the 
avenging function of the Furies ; not as a necessary 
constituent. Even in Theanthropism the moral is 
subordinate to the physical. 


THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THEISM. 137 


The reason is obvious. Natural religion is de- 
rived from the contemplation of external Nature ; 
but external Nature exhibits no trace of moral life. 
There is no apparent sympathy in Nature with 
moral ends, no faintest intimation of the moral law. 
The elements are no respecters of persons: they 
know neither sinner nor saint. The sun smiles 
alike on the evil and the good. The same moon 
lights the robber and the minister of mercy on their 
several ways. The same breeze propels the mer- 
chant’s and the pirate’s sail. Traitor and patriot, 
murderer and missionary, cannibal and Christian, 
all have the same Nature for their heritage, and find 
in Nature the same accommodation. ‘The blue sky 
bends over all, the hospitable earth entertains all, 
— all are served by Nature’s laws. 

How, then, should natural religion attain to the 
idea of the moral law? ‘The deep saith, ‘It is not 
in me ;” earth and sky have not found it. But is 
not the moral law written in the heart of man? 
Religion has only to look there, has only to look 
within, to find moral obligation, and from it to 
infer a moral Ruler of the universe, the holy and 
just God of monotheism. True, and this is pre- 
cisely what distinguishes natural religion from 
“revealed.”” When man looks within, looks deep 
enough to find moral obligation, and to refer it to 
the power and law of which it is the witness, the 


188 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THEISM. 


whole system of natural religion is done away. A 
revelation has been made in him of the one true 
God. Revelation is not from without, but from 
within: it is moral intuition. God reveals himself, 
not by sensible apparition, but by his witness in the 
soul. That testimony, first heard by elect individ- 
uals, — meditative men, like Abraham, Zoroaster, 
Moses, Jesus, — and declared by them, becomes 
what we call a “revelation,” or divine dispensation 
of religion. 

Monotheism, then, comes not by the way of nat- 
ural religion, seeking God without and fusing its 
many gods into one, but by reflection seeking God 
within ; and the difference between natural and re- 
vealed religion consists in this, that in the former the 
religious sentiment is turned outward, and that in the 
latter it is turned inward. 

Quite otherwise, the phrase ‘“‘ Natural Religion,” 
or, more properly, ‘“ Natural Theology,” is com- 
monly used to designate those primordial verities 
which constitute the substance of monotheistic re- 
ligion. This use of the term dates from Raymond 
de Sebonde,! who wrote, in the beginning of the 
fifteenth century, a work which Montaigne, at the 





1 “Theologie naturalis nomine primus usus est Raymundus de 
Sebonde, natione Hispanus, ineunte, sec. xv. auctor libri primum 
editi Daventrie et Theologia Naturalis, sive Liber Creaturarum 
inscripti.’” Wegscheider Institt. Theol. See Herzog’s Real-En- 
cyclopadie for an elaborate account of this work. 


THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THEISM. 139 


instigation of his father, turned into French, and 
to whose defence he devoted the most elaborate, 
though not the most edifying, of the immortal 
Essays. The design of Raymond was to vindicate 
the truths of “ Revelation ” by proofs and illustra- 
tions drawn from Nature. But illustration of a 
truth by the facts of Nature is one thing, the dis- 
covery of it from the contemplation of Nature is 
another. The phrase “ Natural Theology” is an 
unfortunate one, as fostering the delusion, so widely 
spread, that the contemplation of Nature teaches 
monotheism, would teach it to sagacious minds 
where other teaching has not anticipated that re- 
sult. The contemplation of Nature teaches no such 
thing. Nature, the arena of antagonistic forces, the 
scene of perpetual conflict between good and evil, 
— Nature, with her sunshine and calm of to-day, 
her earthquakes and tornadoes of to-morrow, sug- 
gests dualism or polytheism, not the one God, the 
Creator and Father of all. Uninstructed by other 
teaching, and without monotheism already in the 
mind, who would ever divine that the desolate crag 
or blasted voleano was moulded by the same Power 
that flings the rainbow over it? Who would ever 
conclude that the scorpion and the bird of Paradise 
have one Father? Monotheism is not an inference 
from Nature, but the gift of Tradition, or an intui- 
tion of the private soul divinely touched, brooding 


140 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THEISM. 7 


over its own deep. The first monotheist was one 
who withdrew his gaze from the starry heaven and 
the creaturely earth, and found in the secret of his 
own thought the divine “I am.” What they mean, 
or should mean, who speak thus of ‘ Natural Re- 
ligion,” is that system of truths which Nature stud- 
ied in the light of revelation confirms, — not the 
system which Nature teaches. “Rational Religion” 
would be the fitter term. 

To find the one God in Nature, man must first 
have found him within. The religious mind turned 
inward encounters another Divinity than the as- 
pects of Nature had suggested to uninstructed con- 
templation. It finds in the dictates of the moral 
sense, in imperative warnings and obligations, in 
the consciousness of spiritual wants and aspirations, 
a God unknown to natural religion,—a God who 
is not mere Power and Intelligence and command- 
ing Will, but Goodness, Holiness, Truth, Love. 
These constitute the God of moral intuition, —a 
God self-evident, and One in the double sense of on- 
liness and unity. The very idea of such a God ex- 
cludes multitude. There can be but one absolute 
Good. Hence revealed religion is necessarily mono- 
theistic. The natural religions, on the other hand, 
seeking God outwardly, and based on the assump- 
tion of a separation in space between God and man, 
are polytheistic. So long as the divine is con- 


THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THEISM. 141 


ceived as existence in Nature instead of Nature’s 
continent, there is no ground for unity in the God- 
head. On the contrary, many gods, in that case, 
will be required to match the many-sidedness of 
Nature. 

Other characteristics follow from this one. The 
natural religions are sacrificial, the revealed are 
ethical. The natural are hierarchical, the revealed 
are congregational. The natural are idolistic, the 
revealed are scriptural. I speak of tendencies, not 
of uniform results. In practice these tendencies 
are often modified by counter influences, by corrup- 
tions and perversions. When revelations expand 
and harden into ecclesiasticism, they sometimes 
assume the characteristics of naturalism: they be- 
come sacrificial, hierarchical, and here and there 
degenerate into fetishism. 

Revelation must not be confused with systems of 
religion based upon it. Revelation, as such, is 
purely individual experience; the revealed relig- 
ions, such as Jehovism, Parsism, Christianity, Is- 
lam, are providential and historic growths, which - 
may or may not ensue from that experience. Revy- 
elation there has been in the midst of polytheism, 
and through all the course of human history. For 
the truths of the Spirit have no date, although the 
‘¢dispensations”’ which embody them, like other 
social products, are subject to historic necessity, 


142 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THEISM. 


and must bide their time. Revelation in individual 
seers, like Pythagoras, Socrates, and Isaiah, may 
antedate by centuries the organization of its truths 
in ecclesiastical polities. It depends, not so much 
on the clearness and fulness of the revelation, as 
on the personality with which it is associated, and, 
of course, on the providential order of events, 
whether or not the revelation shall become an his- 
toric dispensation. ‘The moral intuitions of Plato 
far transcended those of Mohammed; but the moral 
force, the momentum of personality, the quality of 
soul in Mohammed, exceeded the genius of Plato. 
Adopted by Providence, the slender thought and 
vast soul of the Arab have rallied around them a 
fifth part of the human race, whilst the fuller reve- 
lation of the Greek could only modify Gentile and 
Christian theology with its intellectual leaven. 


The history of religion is a record of man’s search 
after God. It begins with the lowest, and ends 
with the highest; it begins with the most foreign, 
and ends with the most interior; it begins with 
stones and the beasts of the field, and ends with the 
Spirit. Every step in this process is divine educa- 
tion. Nature-worship had its meaning and em- 
bodied an essential truth. The presence of God in 
Nature, the sacredness of Nature, is the truth de- 
posited in the human mind by natural religions 


THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THEISM. 143 


The supremacy of Spirit is the lesson of the re- 
vealed. And so the history of religion repeats the 
story of creation: first that which is natural, then 
that which is spiritual. The natural man seeks God 
in Nature; first in the creaturely forms around him, 
then in the skies. The spiritual knows that the 
Supreme Presence is not a question of topography; 
that the throne above the skies is but the last resort 
of realism; that neither up nor down, nor in any 
outward direction, but inward and ever inward, is 
the way to God. 





VI. 


CRITIQUE OF PROOFS OF THE BEING 
OF GOD. 


6 Iden traditional idea of God is that of a super- 

human, extramundane Being, combining in 
himself all conceivable perfections: from whom, as 
cause and ground, all other being is derived; on 
‘whom, as the universal Providence, all creatures 
depend; whose will, as moral ideal, is the highest 
law for intelligent natures. 

An idea of such transcendent import could not 
fail to stimulate in philosophic minds the attempt 
to verify it by scientific demonstration. Much 
labor and learning have been expended in such 
essays; but still the strongest proof of the Being 
of God is his idea in the universal consciousness of 
man. I say universal, because the exceptions — 
of savage atheism at one extreme of humanity, and 
of philosophic antitheism at the other—do not ma- 
terially invalidate the fact. God in this idea is his 
own witness, and asserts himself with a weight of 
evidence which no resistance of denial, and no in- 
genuity of speculation, can quite countervail. At 


THE BEING OF GOD. 145 


tempts to demonstrate the truth of this idea from 
external data have not been successful. Proofs 
from Nature may entertain the faith of believers, 
but cannot conquer unbelief. For though, to pre- 
disposed minds possessed with the idea, Nature 
confesses God with the manifestations, everywhere 
obvious, of intelligence and law in all her processes 
and functions, these manifestations carry no con- 
viction to the atheist, who sees in them nothing 
more than the necessary conditions of being. In 
the strictness of logic, they have not the binding 
force of demonstration which the advocates of The- 
ism profess to find in them. 

Theology claims that Theism is the best solution 
of the question, Whence this universe of things? 
But the truth of an hypothesis which seems to 
solve a given problem is not established by that 
solution, unless the solution is complete, and leaves 
no question unanswered. If it fails to satisfy that 
condition, it is simply the best hypothesis, nothing 
more. 

What evidence have we of the being of God as 
a real existence essentially distinct from other 
being? 

The demonstration of Deity attempted by Theism 
has developed two sorts of proof, known as a@ pos- 
teriort and a priori; the proof of God from the 


world, as effect presupposing a cause, and the proof 
10 


146 CRITIQUE OF PROOFS OF 


of God from his idea in the mind. The proof a pos- 
terior? has been subdivided into cosmological and 
physico-theological. The @ priori is termed onto- 
logical. 

The cosmological proof is derived by different 
theists from different premises. Locke starts with 
the consciousness which every man has of his own 
existence. Leibnitz,in his ‘*‘ Confessio Nature con- 
tra Atheistas,” argues from the fact of motion. But, 
in each and every case in which this mode of 
reasoning is employed, the gist of the argument is, 
that all sensible phenomena and all finite exist- 
ences must be referred at last to an infinite and 
immaterial Being, as their first cause: inasmuch as 
every phenonemon and every finite existence is 
known to be an effect of some antecedent cause, 
and that cause again an effect of another antece- 
dent, that of another, and so on ad infinitum ; 
which gives a beginningless sequence of cause and 
effect, —as Sir William Hamilton says, “an infinite 
non-commencement.” But that is found to be an 
absurdity and an impossibility. Therefore, it is 
argued, we must suppose, as the cause of all, a 
Being outside of this series, from whom it origi- 
nates: omnipotent, as being the source of all power 
and all things ; intelligent, because intelligence ex- 
ists, and cannot be supposed to be derived from the 
unintelligent, — or, as Locke expresses it, “the cogi- 


THE BEING OF GOD. 147 


tative from the uncogitative.” Philosophers who 
rest in this argument, and especially the two that I 
have named, express the uttermost confidence in 
its validity. Says Locke (Essay, book iv. ch. 10), 
“ Though this [viz., the being of God] be the most 
obvious truth that reason discovers, and though its 
evidence be, if I mistake not, equal to mathematical 
certainty, yet it requires thought and attention, and 
the mind must apply itself to a regular deduction 
of it from some part of our intuitive knowledge. 
. . - To show, therefore, that we are capable of 
knowing, 7.e., of being certain, that there is a God, 
and how we may come by this certainty, I think we 
need go no further than ourselves, and that un- 
doubted knowledge we have of our own existence. 
I think it is beyond question that man has a clear 
perception of his own being: he knows certainly 
that he exists, and that he is something. ... In 
the next place, man knows by an intuitive certainty 
that bare nothing can no more produce any real 
being than it can be equal to two right angles. . .. 
If, therefore, we know that there is some real being, 
and that nonentity cannot produce any real being, 
it is an evident demonstration that from eternity 
there has been something; since what was not from 
eternity had a beginning, and what had a beginning 
must be produced by something else.” He then 
proceeds to show that ‘that eternal Being must be 


148 CRITIQUE OF PROOFS OF | 


7 


most powerful,” “and most knowing,” “and there- 
fore God.’ Immaterial, because the “‘cogitative” 
cannot have been produced by the ‘‘uncogitative.” 
Leibnitz, after showing that every moving body 
must derive its motion from some other body, and 
that, as no body can, by its nature and definition, 
be self-moving, so no infinite series of moving 
bodies can explain the origin of motion, —con- 
cludes that motion must have originated from a 
Being who is not body, ze., from an immaterial 
and omnipotent First Cause. He thereupon de- 
clares his astonishment that this method of demon- 
strating the existence of God has occurred to no 
other philosopher of his day. ‘Et miror neque 
Gassendum, neque alium inter acutissimos hujus 
seculi philosophos, preclaram hane demonstrands 
divine existentiz occasionem animadvertisse.” 


My reverence for Leibnitz and Locke is as great 
as any man’s, “ sed magis amica veritas.” I cannot 
admit the force of either demonstration. Grant 
that an endless chain of existences,—each ante- 
cedent producing its consequent,—an endless se- 
quence of causes and effects, is inconceivable, I 
cannot see that cutting the knot by the supposition 
of a self-existent Being outside of that sequence 
proves the existence of such a Being. It is as- 
sumed that every effect must have a cause; then, 


THE BEING OF GOD. 149 


from the fact that single existences are known to us 
as effects, it is inferred that the entire universe is 
effect, and must have a cause outside of itself. To 
meet this necessity, the argument assumes some- 
thing outside of the universe that caused it. But 
what caused the cause? The answer is, It caused 
itself; it is at once both cause and effect. But, so 
far as the argument intends the solution of an on- 
tological difficulty, it fails by substituting a greater 
difficulty for a less. If inconceivableness is the 
difficulty to be remedied, a self-existent Being out- 
side of the universe, is, to say the least, as incon- 
ceivable as a self-existent universe, and burdens us 
with the additional difficulty of conceiving a point 
of connection between two beings which, by suppo- 
sition, are alien the one to the other. The word 
“omnipotence,” or “infinite power,’’ does not ex- 
plain the difficulty ; for all that we know of power is 
the action of body or spirit on a given object to 
change its condition. Of its action on any thing not 
given, 7.e., of its action on nonentity to produce en- 
tities, we have no knowledge, and can form no con- 
ception. We can judge of infinite power, only by 
what we know of finite power. It must be essen- 
tially the same with finite power, differing only in 
degree, if it be any thing of which we can form any 
notion, or have any logical right to affirm any thing. 
If infinite power can out of nonentity produce a 


150 CRITIQUE OF PROOFS OF 


universe, finite power should be able out of nonen- 
tity, at least to produce some infinitesimal fraction 
of a universe. But no power of which we have any 
experience can do this. Strange that so cautious 
and acute a thinker as Locke should rest in such a 
conception, or rather in a phrase which conveys 
no distinct conception to the mind; that, forsaking 
the sure ground of experience in which his philoso- 
phy loves to dwell, he should link his proof of the 
being of God with so questionable a notion as that 
of the creation of matter by infinite power. “Is it 
not impossible,” he asks, “‘to admit of the making 
of any thing out of nothing, since we cannot pos- 
sibly conceive it?” and he answers, “ No, it is not 
reasonable to deny the power of an Infinite Being 
because we cannot comprehend its operations.” 


Here the good man’s faith gets the better of his 


logic. His proof of Deity rests on the inconceiv- 
ableness of an uncreated universe ; nevertheless he 
acknowledges that creation out of nothing is utterly 
inconceivable. All that is valid in Locke’s demon- 
stration is the first step ; viz., that as something now 
exists, and as nothing cannot produce something, it 
follows that something must always have existed. 
Between that and his idea of God there is an un- 
bridged, and, by that method, unbridgeable, gulf. 
He fails to prove that the universe itself may not 
have existed from all eternity. ‘‘ Inconceivable,” 








THE BEING OF GOD. 151 


yes; but creation out of nothing is equally so. 
“The cogitative cannot have sprung from the un- 
cogitative.” Granted; but does it appear how the 
uncogitative can have sprung from the cogitative ? 
or why both may not be coeternal? The argu- 
ment, I repeat, gives us a greater difficulty for a 
less. Either the infinite Being is a part of the 
series of existences to be explained; and then it 
would be a simpler solution of the difficulty in 
question, and an easier cutting of the knot, to sup- 
pose, with Spinoza, a self-existent, infinite substance, 
uniting both attributes, the cogitative and the un- 
cogitative ; or else the infinite Being is outside of, 
and distinct from, the series of existences to be ex- 
plained, and then the only connection between it 
and those existences is the arbitrary and unintelli- 
gible notion of power. 

The demonstration of Leibnitz is liable to the 
same criticism. It substitutes a greater difficulty 
for a less. The motion of moving bodies cannot, 
he contends, be explained by the action of bodies, 
since no body is self-moving. Therefore we must 
suppose a Being who is not body, to account for the 
origin of motion. But how explain the origin of 
that Being? “ Ratio conclusionis,” he says, tamdiu 
plane non reddita est, quamdin reddita non est ratio 
rationis.” Here, again, it is a cutting of the knot, 
which might also be cut by supposing an eternally 
existing, self-moving world. 


152 CRITIQUE OF PROOFS OF 





Kant (Kr. d. r. V.) charges the cosmological ar- 
gument with being the ontological in disguise. Ac- 
cordingly, his refutation of it attacks the alleged 
ontological character, which I cannot find to be in 
its intent, whatever there may be of such a charac- 
ter in its essence. But he says of it, moreover, 
that it hides a whole nest of dialectical assumptions, 
which transcendental criticism may easily detect 
and demolish. For example, from contingency it 
infers causality. But the principle of causality is 
applicable only to the sensible world: it has no 
meaning, and we have no criterion of its use, out- 
side of that world. But in this case it is used for 
the very purpose of transcending the sensible world. 
In like manner, the inferring of a first cause from 
the alleged impossibility of an infinite series of 
given successive causes is not authorized by prin- 
ciples of reason, even within the sphere of experi- 
ence; much less have we any right to extend the 
inference beyond that sphere into a world to which 
the chain does not reach. It is a false self-content- 
ment of reason to regard this series as completed 
by the final abolition of all conditionality; and 
then, when nothing further can be idealized, to 
accept that as the consummation of one’s idea. 
Moreover, the argument confuses the logical pos- 
sibility of an idea, — the idea of a Being in whom 
all reality combines, with no internal contradiction, 


THE BEING OF GOD. 153 


with the transcendental ; whereas, the practicability 
of such a synthesis demands a principle which 
again would be applicable only within the field of 
possible experience.” “It may be allowed,” he 
says, “to adopt the hypothesis of a Being of the 
highest adequacy as the cause of all possible effects, 
in order to facilitate the unity of explanation which 
reason demands. But to take upon one’s self to 
say that such a Being exists necessarily, is no 
longer the modest expression of an allowable hypo- 
thesis, but the bold assumption of apodictie cer- 
tainty ; for, of that which one professes to cognize 
as absolutely necessary, the cognition also must 
carry with it absolute necessity.” 


The other a posteriori argument to be examined 
is the so-called Physico-theological, more commonly 
known in English theology as the Argument from 
Design. The argument is this: Whatever is by its 
constitution adapted to a particular end supposes 
contrivance, and henceacontriver. Natural objects, 
and especially organized creatures, are adapted to 
- certain ends; they must, therefore, be the product 
of a Being who contrived them for the ends to 
which their adaptation points. Furthermore, as 
the means by which those ends are effected far sur- 
pass all human power and skill, it is argued that 


154 CRITIQUE OF PROOFS OF 


their contriver is a Being whose power and skill 
are infinite. Everywhere in Nature we see what 
seems to us design. Only infinite power and skill 
could plan and execute the nice adaptations by 
which vegetable and animal organs are severally 
adapted to the wants of each creature, and perform 
their life-sustaining and life-propagating functions. 
Look at the human eye, says the theologian; ex- 
amine its complex apparatus of layer, lens, and 
humors, its adjustment to the light without and 
the optic nerve within, observe its capabilities 
and defences; and say if any cause but a God of 
infinite wisdom can explain the miraculous organ ? 
Man was designed to see, and this is the wonder- 
fully skilful device by which that end is accom- 
plished. The argument is a strong appeal to a 
principle in human nature which prompts us to 
infer an intelligent author wherever, in any object, 
we see fitness and use. 

Let us see what degree of validity is fairly 
attributable to this demonstration, and how far, in 
itself, without aid or support from any other source, 
the argument from design is conclusive of the being 
of God. 

It should be premised that the argument origi- 
nated with those who, by inheritance and with- 
out demonstration, were already possessed and 
convinced of the truth to be established. This 





EE 


THE BEING OF GOD. 1568 


circumstance would not invalidate the argument, if 
otherwise conclusive, inasmuch as the aim is not 
to show that men get their idea of God in that way, 
but that the given idea may be thus scientifically 
legitimated. Nevertheless, there is a difference of 
cogency between the reasoning by which a truth is 
discovered, like the truths of astronomy, and that 
by which it is attempted to defend it. If it could 
be shown that an intelligent unbeliever has been in 
any instance converted by it, or a competent rea- 
soner, who (if such a thing were supposable) had 
never heard of a God, has been made a believer by 
it, the fact would add greatly to the strength of the 
argument. What is that argument? 

Whenever we behold a use resulting from the 
constitution and arrangements of a complex object, 
we infer design, and consequently a designer. So 
far as this inference applies to objects which are 
not products of Nature, — to artificial creations, so 
called, — the inference is warranted by experience. 
Have we any logical right to transfer the conclu- 
sions of that experience to natural products, to the 
operations of Nature? To establish that right, to 
authorize that transference, there should be, I 
think, not only an incidental resemblance, but a 
perfect analogy between the two. But what is the 
fact? The works of man and the products of 
Nature resemble each other in a single point; in all 


156 CRITIQUE OF PROOFS OF 


others they are utterly dissimilar, — dissimilar in 
their origin, dissimilar in their conditions, dissimilar 
in their history. In one point, viz., the adaptation 
of means to ends, they coincide: the points in 
which they do not coincide are infinite. Look 
at the works of man. The human artificer 
takes the requisite materials which he did not 
create, but which are furnished to his hand; 
he fashions and puts them together in certain 
combinations, and constructs a machine; let us say 
a watch, a thing that, by operation of a mechan- 
ical law, which man again did not create, but which 
is given him, carries an index around a dial-plate. 
The watch is said to measure time. Properly 
speaking, the watch does no such thing. All that 
the watch does, is to carry two pins, one faster, one 
slower, around a graduated circle. The maker has 
fixed the rate at which they move from figure to 
figure. The possessor notes their position on the 
dial, and by it measures time. Now, what analogy 
is there between this structure and an apple-tree, 
or the human eye, with which Paley compares it? 
What analogy between a manufacture from given 
materials, and the growth that secretes its materials 
as it proceeds. How the eye is formed is a ques- 
tion to which physiology can give only an approxi- 
mate answer. All we can say is that its formation 
is not a manufacture, but a growth; that, by the 


—_ 


) 


THE BEING OF GOD. 15g 


action of certain forces, certain organic filaments 
and particles arrange themselves according to a 
given type. Whence that type, physiology cannot 
say. The theist believes it to be devised by an 
infinitely wise Being, the God of theology. But 
this belief is a foregone conviction, which he in- 
herits by tradition. He brings it to the contempla- 
tion of Nature, and finds it confirmed: but it is not 
the product of that contemplation; no a posteriori 
reasoning can originate it, or demonstrate its truth. 
For observe that, when we say design, we beg 
the question. All we see in the case of the eye is 
adaptation ; a certain co-ordination of parts which 
seem to condition the act of seeing. The idea of 
design is purely subjective, — an idea derived from 
human workmanship, which we apply to Nature. 
Were we not already possessed with the idea of 
God as the Author of Nature; and were it not for 
our irresistible propensity to anthropomorphize, to 
ascribe human methods to the God of our belief, —I 
doubt if we should ever have come upon this me- 
chanical view, this cunning-device theory of natural 
products. I doubt if we should view them as work- 
manship at all. We see how human creations are 
formed : we know what study and calculation go to 
the making of a watch or steam-engine; we know 
that the more complex and effective the mechanism, 
the greater the ingenuity of the author ;— and we 


7 
158 CRITIQUE OF PROOFS OF 


anthropomorphize, we carry our joiner-view of crea- 
tion into Nature, and represent to ourselves a plan- 
ning, contriving intellect as the antecedent Power, 
from whose skilful adjustments and nice calcula- 
tions Nature had its rise. If we came to the con- 
templation of Nature without the idea of God in 
our minds, we should not, I suppose, view it as 
cunning mechanism, or at all as something created 
by antecedent power, but rather as a self-subsisting 
whole. The question of its origin would hardly 
force itself upon us: we should accept it as it is, 
and suppose it to have been always as it is, and 
self-perpetuating. The curiosity of its structure, if 
it came at all into consideration, would not compel, 
nor even, perhaps, suggest, the idea of contrivance 
by an artificer external to itself. We should view 
the adaptation of organ to function and part to 
part in any individual portion of it, as we should 
the whole, as necessarily so constituted, — as some- 
thing which could not be otherwise, if the whole 
was to be at all. This, I think, is the natural, un- 
biassed view of the universe: this is the way it 
would strike us, were not the idea of God given in 
human nature. And this is what Hume means 
when in his “Dialogues concerning Natural Re- 
ligion,” the most sincere and original treatise on 
the subject in English literature, he makes Philo, 
one of the speakers, say, that the world bears a 


THE BEING OF GOD. 159 ~ 


greater resemblance to an animal than it does to a 
machine. 

Does the physico-theological argument disprove 
this view? I cannot see that it does. Paley, the 
Bridgewater essayists, and others of that stamp, have 
not disproved, if even they have fairly considered it. 
They have done nothing to prove the existence of 
God to the satisfaction of a really logical unbe- 
lever, competent to weigh evidence and to judge 
of the force of arguments. They have come to the 
contemplation of Nature, not to ascertain an un- 
known fact, but to justify an assumed one; not 
with a view to an impartial examination of differ- 
ent cosmogonies, but with a cosmogony fixed in 
their minds which they were to verify, with a fore- 
gone conclusion to be confirmed. They had a case 
to make out, and in that they have not succeeded. 
What they have done is worthy of all praise. 
They have brought to view the exquisite adapta- 
tions of Nature, and, on the supposition of a God for 
its author, have abundantly illustrated the won- 
drous skill of the Creator. But the pivotal point 
on which the whole question hinges, this sort of 
demonstration fails to substantiate. That point is 
that the aptitudes of Nature, or what seem to us 
such, prove design in the sense in which the adap- 
tations of a sewing-machine prove design in its 
author. To impute design where we recognize use 


in Nature is, I repeat it, a begging of the question. 
The design we impute is something appertaining 
to ourselves: it is our own subjectivity which we 
import into Nature. 

It has been surmised that what we regard as de- 
sign in Nature may be a necessity inherent in the 
nature of things. ‘It is observed by arithmeti- 
cians,” says Hume, “that the products of 9 compose 
always either 9 or some lesser product of 9, if you 
add together all the characters of which the former 
products are composed. Thus of 18, 27, 36, which 
are products of 9, you make 9 by adding 1 to 8, 
2 to 7,3 to 6. Thus 369 is also a product of 9, and 
if you add 38, 6, and 9, you make 18, a lesser prod- 
uct of 9. By a superficial_observer, so wonderful 
a regularity may be admired as the effect either of 
chance or design; but a skilful algebraist immedi- 
ately concludes it to be the work of necessity, and 
demonstrates that it must for ever result from the 
nature of these numbers. Is it not probable, I ask, 
that the whole economy of the universe is con- 
ducted by a like necessity, although no human al- 
gebra can furnish a key which solves the difficulty. 
And, instead of admiring the order of natural beings, 
may it not happen that, could we penetrate into the 
intimate nature of bodies, we should clearly see 
why it was absolutely impossible that they could 
ever admit of any other disposition?” 


160 CRITIQUE OF PROOFS OF 


ee 


THE BEING OF GOD. 161 


This suggestion, it may be said, can only be 
regarded as an exercise of ingenuity, a trick of fence 
intended to rebut the aggressive dogmatism of the- 
ology, not as pretending to be a sufficient account 
of the order and fitness apparent in creation; that 
it cannot be supposed to be the view sincerely en- 
tertained by a sound and seriously disposed mind, 
of the constitution of things. It may be so: I only 
cite it as showing that design is not the only sup- 
posable explanation of the aptitudes in question. 
And here let me say that I am far from denying 
the theological value of the argument from design ; 
its theological value is great: my criticism concerns 
only its speculative claims. And, speaking in the 
interest of speculative philosophy, I further con- 
tend that, though we grant to this argument the 
fact of design, and therefore a designer, as the true 
and only explanation of natural phenomena, there 
is still an immense gulf between that conclusion 
and the fact of an infinite and perfect Being which 
Natural Theology pretends to deduce from it. 
How does the argument bridge this gulf? The 
great Contriver is seen to be very powerful and 
wise ; and therefore, for aught we know, he may be 
infinitely so. “It is a power,” says Paley, “to 
which we are not authorized by our observation or 
knowledge to assign any limits. . . . It cannot 
with respect to us be distinguished from infinite.” 

11 


162 CRITIQUE OF PROOFS OF 


So much we may readily admit. But to metamor- 
phose this modest negative into that transcendental 
positive which Theism affirms, to exalt the absence 
of known limitation into categorical infinity, to 
read in the marks of power and wisdom surpassing 
human art omnipotence and omniscience, is an 
intellectual tour de force which sober logic is com- 
pelled to disown. When the argument has shown 
a contriver of incomparable skill, it has reached the 
bounds of legitimate induction. The step from that 
to the God of theology —a God not only powerful 
and wise, but just and merciful and true —is not an 
induction, but a leap. More glaring still is the fail- 
ure of this demonstration when, from certain satis- 
factions for which provision has been made in the 
constitution of sentient Nature, it argues a Being of 
infinite benevolence united to infinite power. The 
satisfactions of Nature are many and great: enjoy- 
ment abounds; but suffering also abounds, if not in 
equal measure, yet in a measure which physical 
theology leaves unexplained. Evil pervades the 
system of things. Every stage in the ascent of 
animated Nature, from the polyp to man, is an in- 
crement in the scale of suffering, which challenges 
Theism with an ever louder and angrier Why? and 
which the physical contemplation of the universe 
can never adjust with the theory of omnipotent 


r 


Love. What infinite Benevolence wills, that in- 


THE BEING OF GOD. 163 


finite Power might accomplish. Infinite Benevo- 
lence must will the happiness of sentient beings: 
why then a world so cumbered with enormous woe ? 
is the everlasting protest of heart and flesh against 
the positions of Natural Theology. There zs an 
answer to this protest; but the argument from de- 
sign is not that answer, and cannot furnish it. 
That argument can only plead that the arrange- 
ments of Nature were planned to give pleasure, not 
pain: if pain in any case results from them, it is 
not a designed but an incidental consequence. But 
the incidental consequence, if it does not impeach 
the goodness, would seem to impeach the wisdom 
of God, which failed to provide against such inci- 
dents. ‘ The teeth,” says Paley, “are contrived to 
eat, not to ache. Their aching now and then is in- 
cidental to the contrivance, perhaps inseparable 
from the contrivance;” and he adds that they may 
be ‘“‘a defect in the contrivance.” 

It is easy, no doubt, to exaggerate the evils of 
life and their damaging effect on the cause of The- 
ism. The sceptic in Hume’s Dialogues, I think, 
overstates the theological dilemma when he says, 
“ Allowing, .. . . what you never can prove, that 
animal or at least human happiness in this life ex- 
ceeds its misery, you have yet done nothing. For 
this is not by any means what we expect from in- 
finite power, infinite wisdom, and infinite goodness. 


164 CRITIQUE OF PROOFS OF 


Why is there any misery at all in the world? Not 
by chance surely. From some cause, then. Is it 
from the intention of the Deity? But he is infi- 
nitely benevolent. Is it contrary to his intention? 
But he is almighty.” And he adds: “ Nothing 
can shake the solidity of this reasoning, so short, so 
clear, so decisive, except we assert that these sub- 
jects exceed all human capacity, and that our 
common measures of truth and falsehood are not 
applicable to them.” I believe, on the contrary, 
that this reasoning may be very easily refuted. But 
Hume is entirely right in what he so much insists 
on, — that though the contemplation of the world as 
it is, with its manifold imperfections, would not in- 
validate the doctrine of an almighty, all-wise, and 
benevolent God, were it otherwise established on 
independent grounds, the contemplation of the 
world as it is, does not, of itself, suffice to establish 
that doctrine. 

A curious illustration of the influence of abstract 
speculation on the thinker’s practical estimate of 
life is given in the views of the two English writers 
whom I have quoted,— Paley and Hume. Paley 
revels in the contemplation of the happiness which 
beams upon him from all the aspects of Nature and 
life, and exultingly points to the marks of divine 
benevolence in the constitution of brute and man. 
“It is a happy world after all. The air, the earth, 


THE BEING OF GOD. 165 


the water, teem with delighted existence. In a 
spring noon, or a summer evening, on whichever 
side I turn my eyes, myriads of happy beings crowd 
upon my view.” And in human life, he is sure 
“that the common course of things is in favor of 
happiness; that happiness is the rule, misery the 
exception.”” Hear how Hume, on the contrary, or 
the speakers who may be supposed to represent 
him, intone the wretchedness and sorrows of life. 
“T am persuaded,” says Philo, in the Dialogues, 
“that the best and indeed the only method of 
bringing every one to a due sense of religion is by 
just representations of the wickedness and misery 
of men.” “The people, indeed, replied Demea, 
are sufficiently convinced of this great and melan- 
choly truth. The miseries of life, the unhappiness 
of man, the general corruptions of our nature, the 
unsatisfactory enjoyment of pleasures, riches, hon- 
ors, — these phrases have become almost proverbial 
in all languages. And who can doubt of what all men 
declare from their own immediate feeling and ex- 
perience? . . . As to authorities, you need not seek 
them. Look round on this library of Cleanthes. I 
venture to affirm that, except authors of particular 
sciences, . . . there is scarce one of these innumer- 
able writers from whom the sense of human misery 
has not in some passage or other extorted a com- 
plaint or confession of it.” “ And why should man 


166 CRITIQUE OF PROOFS OF 


pretend to exemption from the lot of all other 
animals? The whole earth . .. is cursed and 
polluted. A perpetual war is enkindled among 
all living creatures. Necessity, hunger, want, stim- 
ulate the strong and courageous; fear, anxiety, 
terror, agitate the weak and infirm. The first en- 
trance into life gives anguish to the new-born 
infant and to the wretched parent. Weakness, 
impotence, distress, attend each stage of that life, 
and it is at last finished in agony and horror.” 
* All the goods of life would not make a very happy 
man; but all the ills united would make a wretch 
indeed, and any one of them almost, (and who can 
be free from every one?) nay, often the absence of 
one good, (and who can possess all? ) is sufficient to 
render life ineligible. Were a stranger to drop on 
a sudden into this world, I would show him, as a 
specimen of its ills, an hospital full of diseases, a 
prison crowded with malefactors and debtors, a field 
of battle strowed with carcases, a fleet foundering 
in the ocean, a nation languishing under tyranny, 
famine,.or pestilence. To turn the gay side of life — 
to him, and give him a notion of its pleasures, 
whither should I conduct him? —to a ball, to an 
opera, to court? He might justly think that I was 
only showing him a diversity of distress and sor- 
row.” “There is no evading such striking in- 
stances,” said Philo, “ but by apologies which still 





THE BEING OF GOD. 167 


further aggravate the charge. Why have all men, 
I ask, in all ages, complained incessantly of the 
miseries of life? They have no just reason, says 
one: these complaints proceed only from their dis- 
contented, repining, anxious disposition. And can 
there, possibly, I reply, be a more certain founda- 
tion of misery than such a wretched temper?” 

On comparing these opposite views of the value 
of life, the suspicion may arise that a radical differ- 
ence of temperament in the two witnesses has col- 
ored their respective and conflicting reports. But 
Hume was not a morbid man. He says in his life 
of himself: “I was ever more disposed to see the 
favorable than the unfavorable side of things,—a 
turn of mind which it is more happy to possess 
than to be born to an estate of ten thousand a 
year.” 

The physico-theological argument, then, whatever 
of practical and theological value may be conceded 
to it, breaks down in the attempt to throw a bridge 
of logic across the chasm which divides the finite 
in human experience from the infinite of human 
thought. To say nothing of the many instances in 
which the alleged fitness in the arrangements of 
Nature is apparently wanting, and where a different 
arrangement would seem to be more conducive to 
animal weal; to say nothing of the subterfuge con- 
tained in the plea of “general laws” by which it 


168 CRITIQUE OF PROOFS OF 


is attempted to cover such cases, and to which the 
obvious answer is, If general laws will not protect 
individual well-being, why are not special arrange- 
ments provided for that end? to say nothing of all 
this, — the argument is unsatisfactory as failing, 
in the first place, to prove from the aptitudes of 
Nature the fact of design in the sense in which it 
is claimed ; and, secondly, as failing, if design be 
allowed, to prove from that the infinite and perfect 
Being whom Theism affirms. 

Kant’s critique of this argument is interest- 
ing, both as logical authority, and as indicating 
a struggle between moral predilection on the 
one hand, and the incorruptible judgment of the 
thinker on the other. ‘This demonstration,” he 
says, “deserves always to be named with respect. 
It is the eldest, clearest, and best suited to the 
common reason of man. It animates the study of 
Nature, as in turn it owes its own being to that, 
and through it obtains for ever new force. It 
carries purpose and design where our observation 
would not of itself have discovered them, and 
enlarges our knowledge of Nature by the guiding 
thread of a special unity, whose principle is outside 
of Nature. This knowledge, again, reacts on its 
cause, —that is, the idea which gave rise to it, — 
and so increases faith in a Supreme Author to an 
irresistible conviction. 








THE BEING OF GOD. 169 


‘Tt would therefore be not only disconsolate, 
but altogether in vain, to attempt to detract any 
thing from the authority of this demonstration. 
Reason, unceasingly elevated by such mighty, and, 
under its manipulation, ever-increasing, although - 
merely empirical, topics of proof, can never by 
doubts of subtile, abstract speculation be so de- 
pressed as not to be roused from every fit of 
brooding irresolution, as from a dream, by the first 
glance which it throws on the wonders of Nature 
and the majesty of the world-fabric, and to lift 
itself from grandeur to grandeur up to the highest; 
from conditioned to condition, up to the supreme 
and unconditioned Author of all. 

“ But although we have nothing to object to the 
reasonableness and utility of this procedure, but, 
on the contrary, have to recommend and encour- 
age it, we nevertheless cannot approve the claims 
which this demonstration would make to apodictic 
certainty, and to an acceptance needing no favor 
or foreign support. And it can do no injury to the 
good cause to tone down the dogmatic language 
of scornful reasoners to that of moderation and 
the modest expression of a faith which suffices to 
pacify, though it may not command unconditional 
subjection. Accordingly, I maintain that the 
physico-theological demonstration alone can never 
demonstrate the existence of a Supreme Being, but 


170 CRITIQUE OF PROOFS OF 


must always leave it to the ontological (to which 
it but serves as introduction) to supply that 
defect.” 

Then, after showing how the argument, even if 
successful in proving the contingency (or deriva- 
tive character) of natural forms, and thence a 
world-architect, fails utterly to prove the contin- 
gency of the substance of Nature, 2.e., to prove a 
world-creator ; after showing how those who em- 
ploy it, in defiance of logical authority, jump from 
their conclusion of a potent and wise artificer to 
that of an infinite and perfect Being, —the peerless 
critic concludes with saying, that ‘The physico- 
theologians have therefore no cause for their coy- 
ness toward the transcendental demonstration, 
and for looking down upon it with the self-conceit 
of clear-seeing masters of natural lore, as on the 
cobweb-fabric of benighted dreamers. For, if they 
would examine themselves, they would find that 
after they have travelled a considerable way on the 


ground of Nature and experience, and found them- — 


selves as far as ever from the object which gleams 
upon their reason, they suddenly quit that ground 
and pass over into the region of mere possibilities, 
where, on the wings of ideas, they hope to reach 
that which had eluded their empirical investiga- 
tion. And when, at last, after this mighty leap, 
they think they have got firm footing, they extend 





THE BEING OF GOD. tit 


the now determined conception (which they have 
come into possession of they know not how) over 
the whole field of creation, and illustrate their ideal, 
—at bottom the product of pure reason, — poorly 
enough, it is true, and far below the dignity of the 
object, by experience, without being willing to 
confess that they have come to its cognition or 
assumption by any other path.” 


The main defect, and the fatal defect, in both of 
the arguments which have been examined, is the 
want of a logical synthesis between eternal exist- 
ence in the one case, or the fitness of creation in 
the other, and the infinite Being, the almighty, all- 
wise, and beneficent Person, whose existence the 
argument aims to establish. The source of each 
argument is a mental necessity which constrains 
the theist to connect in the one case the evident 
dependence, in the other the appearance of design 
in creation, with the preconceived idea of God. 
He carries into Nature what he had in his mind, 
and what he carries that he finds. 


We come now to the a priort or ontological 
proof, known also as the proof by “aseity,” vid 
aseitatis, which means the demonstration of God 
from himself (a se), from the nature of his idea. 
This argument was first suggested, so far as we 


172 CRITIQUE OF PROOFS OF 


know, by a godly Italian, a pupil of the Norman 
Lanfranc, and his successor, — first as prior of Bec, 
then as archbishop of Canterbury, — St. Anselm, a 
man in whom the philosopher and the devotee, 
simplicity of faith and activity of intellect, were 
strangely combined, and who heralded the great 
revival which scattered the sleep of the Dark Ages, 
and irradiated Europe with the dawn of intellectual 
light. The account which his biographer gives of 
his discovery of this demonstration adds to its inter- 
est, if not to its weight. It came into his mind to 
inquire if all that we believe and predicate of God 
might not be proved by one brief argument. The ~ 
thought haunted him by day and by night ; it in- 
vaded his rest, it even disturbed his devotions; 
until once, in the midst of a self-imposed vigil, the 
thought occurred which he endeavored to embody 
in his “ Monologium,” and afterwards in the 
‘‘Proslogium,” or “Fides querens Intellectum.” 
This is the famed ontological proof. We believe that 
God is something than which nothing greater can 
be imagined. But that than which nothing greater 
can be imagined cannot be in the intellect alone: it 
cannot be a mere thought of the mind; for, if it 
were only a thought, it might be conceived as 
existing, and that would be something greater. 
If, therefore, that than which nothing greater can 
be imagined existed in the mind alone, a mere 


THE BEING OF GOD. 173 


conception, then that very thing than which noth- 
ing greater can be imagined would be something 
than which something greater could be imagined, 
which is contradictory. 

This argument, with some modification in the 
form of it, was revived by Descartes five centu- 
ries later, was confirmed by Spinoza, and has been 
approved by some of the foremost of German 
metaphysicians, — not indeed as logically conclusive 
against atheism, but as weighty and profound, 
evincing a true conception of the nature of that 
idea in which thought and thing, subjective contem- 
plation and objective necessity, are so inextricably 
blended. Leibnitz says of it, “I do not contemn 
the argument invented some centuries ago by 
Anselm, which proves that the perfect Being 
exists necessarily ; although I find this defect in 
it, that it presupposes the possibility of the per- 
fect Being. If this one point can be established, 
then the whole demonstration will be complete.” 
Hegel finds this in it, that, as thought and being 
are antithetical, a Supreme Being who is only 
thought is finite, and therefore not really the Su- 
preme Being. 

The ontological argument came to be misrepre- 
sented, and is still understood to affirm necessary 
existence on the simple ground of perfection in the 
object of thought. We have the idea of a Being 


174 CRITIQUE OF PROOFS OF 


embodying all perfection ; but existence is necessary 
to perfection, therefore our all-perfect Being must 
exist. Even Leibnitz seems, in the passage I have 
quoted, to have construed it thus. It is against 
this perverted argument that the mighty polemic 
of Kant is directed ; at least, it is only against this 
perversion that his polemic is valid in the whole 
extent of its demonstration. But against the ar- 
gument so understood his critique is conclusive. 
Kant objects, 1st. That existence is not a predicate, 
not one among other qualities appertaining to a 
thing, but merely a putting of the thing with all 
its predicates. It may make some difference with 
me, practically, whether or no I have the hundred 
pounds which I imagine; but it makes no difference 
as to the idea of the hundred pounds. 2d. He ob- 
jects that necessity affirmed of a logical conclusion 
is a very different thing from necessity of being. 
If I entertain the idea of God at all, I must needs 
ascribe to him such and such predicates, — omnip- 
otence, omniscience, and necessary existence among 
the rest. I may say, the idea of God implies these 
attributes, — that, if he exists at all, he is self- 


existent ; but I can, nevertheless, reject the idea ~ 


altogether, with all its belongings. 

But Anselm’s demonstration is not the ontolog- 
ical argument which Kant assails ; it is not at all 
the absurd syllogism which some would make of it: 





THE BEING OF GOD. 175 


that God is a being possessing all perfections ; but 
existence is one perfection, therefore God exists. 
Anselm does not reckon existence among the divine 
perfections, and thence conclude that the being 
whose idea embraces all perfections must needs 
exist. He compares two modes of conceiving the 
all-perfect Being,— that which conceives him simply 
as an object of thought, and that which conceives 
him as really existing ; and he maintains that, so long 
as God is conceived only as an object of thought, 
—i.e., as a product of the human mind, — we do not 
conceive that than which nothing greater can be 
conceived, in which consists the true definition of 
God. And as to the objection, that a given idea is 
no more perfect for representing an actual existence 
than if it were merely a fiction of the mind, Anselm 
would say that this may be true of finite things: 
they may be conceived as existing or not existing ; 
necessary existence is no part of their idea. Not 
so with the idea of God: in that idea is given 
something which cannot be conceived as not exist- 
ing; but which, if conceived at all, must be con- 
ceived as that necessary existence on which all 
_other existence depends. Otherwise, it is not the 
idea of that than which nothing greater can be 
conceived. 

It must be allowed that this demonstration ex- 
presses a true perception of the grounds of certitude 


176 CRITIQUE OF PROOFS OF 


by which the existence of God is assured to those 
who have the idea, and seek confirmation of its im- 
port. But it has no validity as addressed to unbe- 
lievers. All that it really proves is, that, given : 
the idea of God, it is that of a necessarily existing 
being. The idea is presupposed as something given 
by religion. The argument rests on the postulate 
of faith. Hence, the title of Anselm’s treatise, 
“Fides querens Intellectum.” Descartes, who 
repeats the argument, places its whole force in the 
consciousness we have that our idea of God must 
have God for its author. “ Tota vis argumenti,” 
he says, “in eo est quod agnoscam fieri non posse 
ut existam talis nature qualis sum, nempe, ideam 
Dei in me habens, nisi revera Deus etiam existeret. 
Deus, inquam, ille idem cujus idea in me est.” But 
this conviction does not admit of being logically 
legitimated ; and whilst we feel, as certainly a ma- 
jority of the deepest thinkers have felt, the substan- 
tial weight of the ontological argument, we cannot, 
in the cause of Theism, employ it against systematic 
atheism. In that service it avails as little, perhaps 
even less, than the a posteriori proof from design. 
“The really profound thought it embodies,” says 
Hegel, “has acquired a false and shallow aspect 
from being forced into the form of a conclusion of 
the understanding.” 

Kant, who rejects, in his “ Kritik,” &c., the on- 


THE BEING OF GOD. 177 


tological proof, on the ground that you never, as he 
says, can thresh or shell (heraus klauben) existence 
out of thought, had previously attempted an argu- 
ment somewhat resembling it in his ‘“‘ Kinzig moég- 
licher Beweisgrund zur Demonstration des Daseins 
Gottes.” He there offers a demonstration, — or, to 
state it more exactly, the ground of a demonstra- 
tion, — which, whilst in abstruseness and subtlety 
it exceeds that of Anselm and Descartes, holds less 
of spiritual reality, as it seems to me; and, if more 
logical in form, is less weighty in substance, and 
therefore less convincing than the one we have just 
been considering. The demonstration is based on 
the abstract notion of possibility. Possibility is re- 
lation to something given: it therefore presupposes 
existence. Something is possible: therefore some- 
thing exists which makes it possible. If all exist- 
ence is denied, there is no material for supposing 
any thing; and consequently all possibility ceases, 
— possibility being the supposition of a supposable 
thing. Here, at the very threshold, a criticism sug- 
gests itself. What we mean by possibility is the 
perception of agreement between given ideas: it 
resolves itself, at last, into a state of the thinking 
mind. Not only, therefore, does possibility cease 
when existence is denied, but it ceases also if intel- 
ligence is denied. We might, therefore, on Kant’s 
premise of interior possibility implying existence, 
12 


178 CRITIQUE OF PROOFS OF 


shorten the process, and say at once, that possibility 
implies intelligence. Kant seems to treat the notion 
of possibility as something objective, — something 
distinct from thought. There is no contradiction, he 
says, in denying all existence ; only we cannot deny 
existence and still retain possibility, because then 
there would be no material for thinking. But 
suppose I deny possibility, as well as existence, 
what becomes of the argument? It is true, the 
denial of possibility presupposes existence as well 
as the affirmation of it. It presupposes the denier. 
Here we come at once to Descartes’ Cogito ergo 
sum ; and it does not appear why this is not a bet- 
ter, because a nearer and more appreciable, point of 
departure, than the abstract notion of possibility. 
We need not follow the process by which, from 
existence presupposed in possibility, the argument 
deduces a necessary Being, and then logically de- 
monstrates the unity, the simplicity, the unchange- 
ableness, the eternity, the supreme reality, of that 
Being. But, when in the Vierte Betrachtung the 
author proceeds to show that the necessary Being 
is a spirit, it is curious to see how he slides into the 
inductive, and falls plump on the very satisfactory 
cause-and-effect argument whose validity in this 
application he afterward, in the treatise of “ Pure 
Reason,” disallows. “The properties of a Spirit, 
Understanding and Will, are of such a kind that 


THE BEING OF GOD. 179 


Wwe cannot conceive any reality which would com- 
pensate a Being for the want of them. And since 
these properties are those which are capable of the 
highest degrees of reality, and are at the same time 
among the possible, it would follow [that is, if we 
deny them to the Supreme Being] that understand- 
ing and will and all the reality of the spiritual 
nature are, through the necessary Being as a 
ground, possible in others, whilst yet they are not 
to be found, as belonging to its nature, in that 
Being itself. Accordingly, the effect would be 
greater than the cause.” Most true! But this 
conclusion is not the legitimate yield of the a priori 
method hitherto pursued in this demonstration. 
The author ascribes understanding and will to the 
necessary Being, not because he finds them in the 
nature of that Being, but because he finds them 
in finite and contingent being, and cannot account 
for them there except on the principle of cause and 
effect. 

It has seemed to me that an argument simpler 
than that of Kant, and equally rational, might be 
drawn from the nature of space. Space is that 
which cannot by any possibility be conceived as 
non-existent. We may imagine every thing out of 
space, every space-occupying thing annihilated ; 
but space will still remain. But space, says Kant, is 
relative: it cannot be conceived without conceiving 


180 CRITIQUE OF PROOFS OF 


something else. If, therefore, space remains, though 
all space-occupying objects be supposed non-existent, 
the something else must be a subject not occupying 
space, — that is, spirit: or, to put the thing in a 
different shape, space has no existence except as 
contemplated ; it is, in its essence, external. If, 
therefore, space must have always existed, there 
must also have been always a contemplating sub- 
ject. We cannot conceive of space antecedent to 
all created being, without also conceiving an intel- 
ligent mind. We cannot deny its essential exter- 
nality, implying a conscious subject to which it is 
external. Say, if you will, that the mind itself, in 
attempting to conceive of pure space devoid of all 
ereated being, by a necessary act of imagination 
constitutes itself the conscious subject contemplat- 
ing space, and then by a trick of subreption substi- 
tutes God in the place of self. That very necessity, 
which is nothing less than a law of the mind, is 
presumptive evidence in favor of the truth that a 
conscious subject must have preceded all objective 
finite being, which truth is the very kernel of 
Theism. 

Kant affirms that the cosmological, the physico- 
theological, and the ontological proofs are the only 
possible methods of demonstrating the existence 
of God. Yet Kant, in his “ Critique of Practical 
Reason,” suggests another more potent than these, 


a 


THE BEING OF GOD. 181 


derived from the moral law; whose empire in hu- 
man nature implies an authority above nature, a 
divine Lawgiver. 


I think there is still another, which I will briefly 
indicate. To make it intelligible, we must first 
disabuse ourselves of a very ancient and inveterate 
prejudice, —the most obstinate of all our preju- 
dices, —that which supposes the existence of an 
external world subsisting by virtue of a certain 
substratum to which we give the name of matter, 
and which, though as commonly conceived it has 
the reputation of something pre-eminently solid, as 
if it were solidity itself, every thinker knows to 
be the merest fancy that ever got named in human 
speech. Schelling, in the Introduction to his “‘ Tran- 
scendental Idealism,” says, “‘ The one ground-preju- 
dice to which all others may be reduced is none other 
than this, that there are [material] things with- 
out us; a belief which because it rests on no rea- 
sons or conclusions (for there is not a single proof 
of it that will bear examination), and yet does not 
admit of being eradicated by any proof of the con- 
trary, lays claim to immediate certainty. But since 
it relates to something by supposition entirely dif- 
ferent from ourselves, — nay, opposed to ourselves, 
— of which it is impossible to understand how it 
can enter into our immediate consciousness, the 


182 CRITIQUE OF PROOFS OF 


belief must be regarded as nothing more than a 
prejudice, — an inborn and original prejudice, it is 
true, but not the less a prejudice on that ac- 
count.” He afterward finds the proposition, “‘ There 
are things without us,” to be practically identical 
with the proposition, “I am.” It is one of the 
curiosities of psychology, that this emptiest of all 
abstractions, a pure creation of the human mind, 
—the notion of matter which Leibnitz defines as 
the sleep of the Monads, and Hemsterhuys as 
spirit curdled, Schelling as spirit in equilibrio, — 
that this conceit should have dominated, not only 
natural science, where it has its uses, but also the- 
ology and philosophy, where it is a senseless ob- 
struction, a hindrance to all right perception. The 
belief in matter, as it lies at the foundation of most 
of the atheism in the world (not indeed of Schopen- 
hauer’s, who believes in no such thing), so it also 
underlies most of the attempted demonstrations — 
I mean, the a posteriori demonstrations — of the 
existence of God. Those demonstrations presume 
the existence of matter, —a tertiwm quid, something 
intervening between God and the finite mind; 
but leave us in the dark as to whether the supposed 
matter, the material of creation, was created before 
the forms of which it is supposed to be the stuff, 
and then moulded into those forms as the potter 
moulds his clay, or whether it was created simulta- 


THE BEING OF GOD. 183 


neously with those forms. In either case, since 
matter by supposition is a substance distinct from 
God, these arguments involve the inconceivable- 
ness, not to say contradiction, of the origination of 
substance out of no substance, — something out of 
nothing. 

Let us, then, dismiss from our minds the notion of 
matter, and view the phenomenal world as a se- 
quence of mental experiences, — seeing, hearing, 
feeling, tasting, and the like. I inquire the origin 
and ultimate ground of those experiences. My con- 
sciousness tells me that I am not their author. I 
do not cause, but receive them. In some of them 
I am entirely passive; in others, my action is one, 
but not the sole, factor. The experience refers me 
to a cause without, and the cause must be adequate 
to the effect. And here is where all material ex- 
planation fails: for matter, by supposition, is inert 
and powerless ; it could not of itself, were there 
any such thing, produce an effect. The cause must 
be a power, and the power must be equal to my 
uttermost experience. If I have an experience 
which I call seeing a star a hundred million of 
miles removed, the power must be equal to that 
effect. Again, a portion of those experiences I 
classify as intelligent and sentient beings like my- 
self. On comparing my experience with theirs, I 
find an almost uniform agreement. What is white 


184 CRITIQUE OF PROOFS OF 


to me is white to them, what is black is black; we 
agree in square and round, in hot and cold. Hence 
I infer the unity of the power which creates these 
experiences in different minds. Following this line 
of induction, I arrive to the idea, not precisely of 
the God of theology, but yet of a Being resembling 
that as nearly at least as the Being demonstrated 
by the physico-theological argument. 

The demonstration which I have indicated is 
substantially Malebranche’s doctrine of seeing all 
things in God. After showing that we perceive 
objects not in and through themselves, but by 
means of their ideas, Malebranche says, **It is cer- 
tain that ideas are effective, because they act upon 
the mind. . . . Now, nothing can act immediately 
on the mind, unless superior to the mind. Only 
God can do that.” ‘Rien ne le peut que Dieu seul. 
Car il n’y a que |’ Auteur de notre étre qui en puisse 
changer les modifications” (Recherche de la V érité, 
L. III. ch. vi.). I shall not pursue the argument: 
I only suggest it. I do not affirm that it has the 
force of absolute demonstration. But I think I may 
claim for it as much of validity at least as logical 
analysis finds in the stock arguments of Natural 
Theology. Those arguments attempt to prove the 
existence of God from things; but the existence 
of things, as Descartes has shown, is less certain 
than that of God. The certainty of things depends 
on the certainty of God. 


THE BEING OF GOD. 185 


The fact is, the belief in God precedes and under- 
lies all the attempts to prove his existence, and 
vitiates all the reasoning in such demonstrations. 
The idea being given, to defend it by reasoning is 
one thing, to discover it by reasoning is a very differ- 
ent thing, and a feat that was never yet accom- 
plished by mortal wit. The idea is given, a glance 
at Nature confirms it, and all that is essential in the 
argument from design is the feeling which demands 
intelligence as the co-ordinate of being. It is not 
the wonders of anatomy or cosmology, as portrayed 
in the Bridgewater treatises, that compel belief: 
they are simply responses to, or reflections of, the 
God-idea ; all the cogency they have in the way of 
proof, the simplest existences have as well. For of 
all existence the correlate in reason is absolute 
Being, —i.e., God. He to whom Nature undissected 
is not the immediate presence of God will never 
reach him by dissection. When Vanini was ar- 
raigned before the Senate of Toulouse on the 
charge of atheism, he picked up a straw from the 
floor, and said to his judges: “This straw compels 
me to confess that there is a God.” A straw is as 
much a witness of God as any process of animal 
life. On the ground of the argument from design, 
we want a God as much for the first filament of in- 
cipient organization as we do for the finished curi- 


186 CRITIQUE OF PROOFS OF 


osity of the human hand, as much for a blade of 
grass as we do for a star, as much for a single wild- 
flower of the woods as we do for the arch flower of 
creation. And, on the ground of the cosmological 
argument, we need him as much for a chaos as we 
do for a cosmos. The first aspect of Nature sug- 
gests a God, not on the principle of cause and 
effect, but because it reflects to us the idea in our 
mind. A glance does that as well, or even better, 
than an anatomical demonstration. “We murder 
to dissect ;”’ and he who does not, like Adam in 
Paradise, hear the voice of the Lord God walking 
in the garden, will never find him by following the 
anatomist along the paths of dusty death. 


To the question, Is there any proof of the exist- 
ence of God? I answer without hesitation, There 
is none in the sense of syllogistic demonstration, — 
none which has the force of a mathematical conclu- 
sion, —none in which logic may not detect some 
flaw, some vulnerable point, some tendo Achillis ex- 
posed to the shafts of criticism. Is it asked why 
a truth so fixed in human faith, and so essential to 
human well-being, should not admit of irrefragable 
proof? JI answer that its very certainty precludes 
demonstration. There is nothing of which you are 
more certain than you are of your own existence ; 
and nothing which you would find it more difficult 


THE BEING OF GOD. 187 


to prove, in words, to one who, for the sake of argu- 
ment, should undertake to deny it. Your subjec- 
tive certainty, expressed by the Cogito ergo sum of 
Descartes, you would find it difficult by any pro- 
cess of logic to convert into objective certitude. 
Ali attempts to prove the existence of God labor 
with this difficulty, that the thing to be proved is 
more certain than the topics of proof by which it is 
attempted to prove it. We know God, if at all, 
not by inference, but by direct intuition. So Norris 
argues in his “ Theory of the Ideal World.” “God 
is seen by his own light.” “If God,” says this brave 
Platonist, “‘as being pure Act (for which he quotes 
Thomas Aquinas], be the most intelligible object, 
then he must be intelligible in the most perfect 
manner, or else he will not be what we suppose, — 
the most intelligible object. But now it seems 
plain, that for a thing to be intelligible by another 
thing is not to be intelligible after so perfect a 
manner as to be immediately intelligible in and by 
itself. And, therefore, whatever necessity there 
may be of ideas! for the understanding of other 
things, we have reason to conclude that God is by 
himself immediately intelligible, and to be seen by 


1 That is, representative ideas. The author, as idealist, sup- 
poses that sensible objects are seen by representative ideas ; but 
God, he argues, is seen without the intervention of these, — is seen 
by immediate intuition. 


188 CRITIQUE OF PROOFS OF, ETC. 


his own light as being himself that pure and perfect 
light in which there is no darkness at all.” In 
other words, God is his own witness; and his wit- 
nessing of himself in every unsophisticated mind 
and every sound heart is the surest and most satis- 
factory proof we can ever have of this primary 
truth. If God exists, it is incredible that the Being 
so named should not give assurance of himself to 
intelligent thought, should not bear witness of him- 
self in intelligent minds. And, on the other hand, 
the most philosophical, the only rational, way of 
explaining the general, not to say universal, belief 
in God, is the supposition of an object correspond- 
ing to that belief. 

“T have not,” says Kant, in the preface to the 
“Kinzig méglicher Beweisgrund,” —*I have not 
so high an opinion of the utility of an undertak- 
ing like the present as to suppose that the most 
important of all our cognitions, There is‘a God, is 
insecure without the aid of metaphysical investi- 
gations. Providence has not willed that those per- 
ceptions most necessary to happiness should rest on 
the subtlety of fine conclusions ; but has given them 
directly to the natural, common understanding, 
which, if we do not confuse it with false art, will 
not fail to lead us to the true and the useful, so far 
as it may be most needful for us.” 


VII. 
ON THE ORIGIN OF THINGS. 


A BEGINNING of being is inconceivable ; 
a beginning of existence there must have 
been. I use with distinction two words which are 
commonly regarded as synonymous. For ordinary 
purposes, they may properly enough be so regarded. 
But in strictness of thought they are not synony- 
mous; the things signified are not identical. A 
distinction of ideas is implied in the fact of two 
different words in the languages of civilized peo- 
ples. Existence presupposes being; but being 
does not necessarily include existence. Being is 
the évtws dv, existence the dAXws dv, of the Pla- 
tonists. Being is universal ; existence is particu- 
lar. Being is absolute; existence is relative. 
Being is eternal ; existence is transient. The one 
is insensible and unsearchable ; the other comprises 
the sensible universe of things. 
And the sensible universe had a beginning. 
The whence, the how, and the why of that begin- 
ning is the ever-disputed problem of ontology. 


190 ON THE ORIGIN OF THINGS. 


Time was when men were content to accept the 
world as it is, — to look upon it as self-existent, — 
without inquiring its cause or ground. But when 
advancing culture stimulated intellectual curiosity, 
philosophy began to speculate on the origin of 
things. Observation of natural processes, — birth 
and death, change and decay of visible forms — 
suggested the thought that all things are in flux. 
“TTdvra pet,” said Herakleitos. But an everlast- 
ing flood supposes an everlasting fountain. A 
never-beginning series of transient existences is 
an impossibility. There must have been a first, 
and, before that first, an unbeginning something 
that gave it birth. The conviction arose of a 
Power behind this world of shows, — unseen, un- 
known, but absolute and eternal. This Power 
might be conceived as single or as dual, or even as 
plural ; for the “‘ Elohim” of the Pentateuch ex- 
presses an indefinite number, and the “ Atoms ”’ of 
Epicurus, which represent in his system the invisi- 
ble agency, are supposed innumerable. 

The two ideas,—the eternal and the temporal, 
the infinite and the finite, — being given, creation 
would seem to be the logical relation of the one to 
the other. Intelligence in the finite would seem to 
be best explained by the supposition of creative 
intelligence in the infinite. Spinoza neutralizes 
the distinction between the two by making the 


ON THE ORIGIN OF THINGS. 191 


finite a mode of the infinite, and endowing the 
latter with the two attributes of thought and ex- 
tension. And Fichte, in the spirit of Spinozism, 
pronounces the idea of creation to be the ground- 
error of false metaphysic.1 . But “creation” is a 
word of wide significance ; formation by a conscious, 
intelligent Will, —the traditional view of Theism,— 
is not the only conceivable genesis. Others have 
been propounded. The various attempts to formu- 
late the copula between being and existence have 
given rise to so many distinct theoretical cosmogo- 
nies, the more important of which may be classed 
under the following heads: Creation by chance ; 
creation (divine) by proxy; creation by emana- 
tions; creation by God out of pre-existing mat- 
ter ; creation out of nothing ; creation out of spir- 
itual substance ; and, lastly, ideal creation. 
Creation by chance, in the Epicurean cosmog- 
ony, postulates two conditions,—an infinity of 
atoms, and motion. The atoms set in motion, 
being furnished with hooks, — or, in modern phrase, 
having mutual affinities, —must needs combine. 
Out of an infinite variety of possible combinations, 
there was but one that would give the result of 
a life-sustaining, self-propagating world. If the 


1 Schelling, with truer consistency, affirms that no idea of God- 
head can be considered complete which does not include the attri- 
bute of Creator. 


TNR oe 


192 ON THE ORIGIN OF THINGS. 


atoms formed any other connection, the mésalliance 
would prove infructuous and end in swift divorce. 
As good luck would have it, after numberless fail- 
ures, they finally blundered into right relations ; 
and behold a world! 

Cicero’s criticism on this theory — the compari- 
son with the letters of the Iliad —is well known. 
The chief and fatal objection to it is its exorbitant 
postulate. Why not ask a finished universe, at 
once? One might as well grant the atoms in origi- 
nally right relations as grant them in motion. For 
whence that motion? Motion is conceivable only 
as resulting from impulse, and impulse presupposes 
a force whose action itis. You cannot have mo- 
tion without a power to originate motion. And 
that power must be self-determining, since by sup- 

‘position there is nothing that could determine it ; 
in other words, it must be a supreme Will. It is 
easier to suppose, with Spinoza, a self-existent uni- 
verse, and so abandon the idea of creation, or an 
origin of things, than it is to suppose atoms in 
motion without a moving power. The theory of 
creation by chance must be rejected as less simple 
than no creation. 

Creation by proxy was a Jewish device for say- 
ing the holiness of God from actual contact with 
matter. The strong repulsion of the Hebrew mind 
from Egyptian and Syrian Nature-worship had, in 


ON THE ORIGIN OF THINGS. 193 


the period succeeding the Captivity, reached the 
point of entire separation from Nature. Starting 
with the notion of holiness in the sense of apart- 
ness, Jehovism had developed the idea of a God 
too holy for any thing. To impute creation, other 
than that of spirits like himself, to a Being so sub- 
lime, was to derogate from the awful Majesty. 
How could the high and holy One be supposed to 
occupy himself with fashioning the impure creatures 
of earth? If such creatures must be, it was abso- 
lutely necessary that some inferior agent should 
give them being. The God of Judaism dwelt 
apart in unapproachable holiness. You must not so 
much as speak hisname. Hence the idea of a second, 
— a Creator-God, the Son or Wisdom or Word, —an 
idea which, in this aspect and application, is quite 
as much a Jewish as it is a Platonic conception. 
Respecting this theory, it is enough to say that 
what is gained by it in one way is lost in another. 
If it saves the holiness of God, it does so at the 
expense of his personal interest in his creatures ; 
which practically is the most essential element in 
the idea of Godhead, and without which God for 
us is an empty name. It gives us, for the Author 
of our being, a secondary agent,—a Creator who 
lacks finality, — and therefore can never quite sat- 
isfy the highest and freest aspirations of the soul. 


The theory of creation by emanations, or zons, 
13 


194 ON THE ORIGIN OF THINGS. 


has its root, or one of its roots, in the same idea of 
the absolute separation of Deity from Nature; and 
the other, in the correlate idea, which Judaism 
proper did not develop, — the essential pravity of 
matter. It was the doctrine of the Gnostic systems, 
which prevailed in the first three centuries of our 
era, and differs from creation by proxy in this: 
that creation by proxy, though accomplished by 
another, was willed by the Supreme ; whereas, in 
the Gnostic theories, the Supreme had no part in 
the work, — did not even consent to it. The eons 
had it all their own way. Of these eons, there 
were several orders; according to Basilides, three 
hundred and sixty-five, — one for each day in the 
year, —all governed by ‘“‘ Abraxas,” which means 
three hundred and sixty-five. The first two, a 
male and a female, were begotten by the will of 
the Father, — “ Bythos”’ (the Abyss). These be- 
gat others; these, still others; and so on; each 
new generation, by its further remove from the 
Bythos, becoming less ethereal than its predecessor, 
but still inhabiting the ‘‘ Pleroma,” and sharing the 
divine essence. The outermost members of this 
hierarchy found themselves living on the confines 
of Matter, which some represent as coeternal with 
God; others, as the wreck of a fallen spiritual 
world. Perceiving its capabilities, they were 
tempted to lay hands on it, and make a world. 


ON THE ORIGIN OF THINGS. 195 


This huge indiscretion has been the source of 
unnumbered woes to the souls which the thievish 
zons, Prometheus-like, abstracted from the essence 
of the Supreme, and imprisoned in mortal bodies. 
It necessitates a long and painful process of re- 
_ demption by which in time the captive souls shall 
be set free, and restored to the “ Pleroma” from 
whence they sprang. Then God will exert himself, 
will dissolve the fabric of the material universe ; 
Matter will be confined within its original bounds, 
and all will be as it was before the unlucky mis- 
take of creation. 

The theories vary, in some of their details, with 
the different schools of Gnosticism ; but the fun- 
damental principles are the same in all. Marcion 
supposes creation to be the work of a Demiurge, 
who holds a middle place between the Prince of 
Light and the Prince of Darkness, — between God 
and the Devil. He is the being whom the Jews, 
under the name of Jehovah, worshipped as su- 
preme. That was their mistake. He is not the 
Supreme; he is only Demiurge. He is neither 
wholly good nor wholly bad: good, inasmuch as 
he rewards the good ; but he also punishes the bad, 
which a perfectly good Being would not do. 

On the whole, the farrago of theosophic foolery 
known as Gnosticism requires no comment from 
the modern critic. I have none to make. 


196 ON THE ORIGIN OF THINGS. 


Next come the two theories, of creation from 
pre-existing material, and creation out of nothing. 
The prevailing theory of the ancients, common to 
Hebrew and Greek, was that of creation from a 
given material. ‘ The earth was without form and 
void,” says the Elohist, when “ the Spirit of God 
moved upon the face of the waters,” and called into 
being, first, light ; then the strong firmament sepa- 
rating the waters; then grass and trees; then sun, 
moon, and stars ; then fishes and birds; then cat- 
_ tle; then man. “ First of all,” sings the Greek 
theogonist, ‘“‘ there was chaos; then the broad- 
breasted Earth; then Love ; then Night and Erebus, 
and from their coition ther and the Day. Then 
Earth created for herself the covering, Heaven.” 
Ovid, some centuries later, knows no other begin- 
ning of things : — 

“Ante mare et tellus et quod tegit omnia coelum, 

Unus erat toto nature vultus in orbe, 

Quem dixere chaos, rudis indigestaque moles.” 
“‘ Moles,” however, does not express precisely what 
the Greeks meant by the word “chaos.” They 
understood by that term something less positive 
and solid, so far as we can judge from the ety- 
mology of the word. Chaos, from yaw(ew), “to 
yawn, to cleave asunder.” We have an English 
word which comes directly from the same root, — 
‘‘chasm.” Chaos, indeed, though not the mathe- 


ON THE ORIGIN OF THINGS. 197 


matical “nothing” of the next theory, was a kind of 
nothing. It was substance without quality, — if 
such a thing can be conceived, — substance with 
no attribute but extension. It was the pu dv of 
Plato, which must not be confounded with ov« ov 
or ovdév. The French language expresses the dif- 
ference by the two terms néant and rien. Néant 
is that which lacks all quality and life, whose 
nature we, even in English, express by the word 
‘“‘ nothingness,” but of which existence may never- 
theless be predicated; whereas rien is pure priva- 
tion, — absence not only of quality but of being. 
It is true, néant is sometimes used in the sense of 
rien; it comes from the Italian niente, which has 
that sense, and no other. But there zs this distine- 
tion between comparative nothing and absolute 
nothing, the 4) dv and the ov« dv. Schelling de- 
fines the former as that which is capable of all 
determinations, but devoid of all, — the pure sport 
of divine free-will. Chaos, then, in the old Greek 
sense, at least in the etymological sense, is, being 
emptied of all accidents, —emptiness. This, how- 
ever, as it was not Ovid’s, so it is not the common, 
understanding of the term; for the obvious reason 
that the vulgar mind can form no conception of 
being without accidents, and can see no distinction 
between undetermined being and no being. Ac- 
cordingly, the latest modern form of the theory of 


198 ON THE ORIGIN OF THINGS. 


creation from a pre-existing material invests that 
material with certain accidents, and supposes, if I 
rightly understand it, a heterogeneity of essence 
latent in homogeneity of mode. That latest form 
is the so-called nebular hypothesis, commonly re- 
ferred to Laplace, but whose first suggestion, I 
believe, is due to Kant. The nebular hypothesis 
supposes the existing cosmos to be the product, 
under natural laws, of an aboriginal, gaseous mass, 
which took on a rotary motion, and continued to 
rotate around a centre of its own, until, the centri- 
fugal force in the outermost portion exceeding the 
centripetal, it gave forth successively detached 
rings, which broke into fragments, and, still rotating, 
formed the various bodies of the planetary systems. 

Of the truth or plausibility of this hypothesis 
it would be presumptuous in me to speak. As a 
statement of the immediate antecedents of the 
present cosmos, it seems to be generally accepted 
by physicists. But, considered as exhaustive cos- 
mogony, it is obviously inadequate. Nor did Kant 
propound it in any such sense. Granted the exist- 
ence of the vapor or gas-world as antecedent and 
material of the present creation, that material 
surely cannot be supposed to have existed from 
eternity, nor yet to have been created with a view 
to subsequent creations. Created out of what? 
Shall we say, Out of nothing? But we are speak- 


ON THE ORIGIN OF THINGS. 199 


ing of the theory of creation from a pre-existing 
material. The hypothetical gas-world cannot be 
otherwise understood than as the result of a fore- 
gone creation, — the relic of a perished world, of 
which the present is but the apokatastasis, according 
to Origenic dreams, — the steam that went up from 
a universe in flames, and that will go up again 
when ‘ the elements shall melt with fervent heat, 
and the earth that now is and the works that are 
therein shall be burned up.” At any rate, it is 
wholly unintelligible as a finality in the investiga- 
tion of the origin of things. It leaves unanswered 
the question suggested by so many other theories 
and argumentations, — Whence all this gas? The 
same objection applies to every form of the theory 
of creation from pre-existing material. Whence 
the material? If we say, Created outright, we 
abandon the theory. If we say, Given from eter- 
nity, we have a dualism which can never, I think, 
satisfy the philosophic mind; inasmuch as it mili- 
tates with a fundamental principle of logic, — the 
principle of the “ sufficient reason.” 

We come to the theory of creation out of noth- 
ing. I call it a theory, and yet it hardly deserves 
that name, if by theory we mean intellectual vision, 
with a veritable theorowmenon for its object. It 
has been and is still the prevailing doctrine of the 
Christian Church, stoutly maintained by Irenzus, 


200 ON THE ORIGIN OF THINGS. 


who says, in his work against Heresies, that, where- 
as men can make nothing except from a given ma- 
terial, God, on the contrary, himself created the 
material of his creations, which had no previous 
existence: by St. Augustine, who, in his “ Confes- 
sions,” argues that God could not have made 
heaven and earth from his own essence, for then 
would they be equal with God; neither from a 
pre-existing material, for originally there was 
nothing but God; therefore he must have made 
them out of nothing: reaffirmed by Thomas Aqui- 
nas in the Middle Age, and insisted on by modern 
Orthodoxy. And yet it is not a Biblical doctrine, 
and derives no sanction from Scriptural authority. 
The only Biblical passage alleged in its support is 
an apocryphal one. In the second book of Macca- 
bees, vii. 28, the mother of the seven martyrs says 
to her youngest, “I beseech thee, my son, look 
upon the heaven and the earth, and all that is 
therein, and consider that God made them of things 
that were not,” — “ ov« dvtwyv,” which the Vulgate 
renders ‘“‘ex nihilo.” The meaning of the passage is 
doubtful, and may be rendered, according to some, 
by quum non essent, “ while as yet they were not.” 
At all events, another apocryphal passage (Wis- 
dom, xi. 17) tells us that the almighty hand made 
the world of formless matter, — ‘‘ €& auopdou trys.” 3 


1 D. F. Strauss, Christliche Glaubenslehre, par. 46. 


ON THE ORIGIN OF THINGS. 201 


So both passages, being of equal authority, neu- 
tralize each other. Schelling, always reverent 
toward Orthodoxy, remarks that there must be 
something in a doctrine so universally accepted. 
“Tt is not to be unconditionally repudiated,” he 
says; ‘only it must be explained.” And he ex- 
plains it to mean “ creatio absque omni preexistente 
potentia.” Unquestionably, there is something in 
the doctrine. It was the Church’s protest — and a 
very needful protest — against the Manichean and 
Gnostic dualism, which ascribed independent eter- 
nity to matter, and made it the source of all natural 
and moral evil. Further significance it has none. 
On the contrary, if creation is understood to be 
substantial, —if it means fabrication of matter as 
well as generation of forms, fabrication of a sub- 
stance ontologically distinct from the substance of 
God, and whose only antecedent is the divine Will, 
— then the doctrine, fairly envisaged and analyzed, 
asserts something unintelligible and unimaginable ; 
something which the tongue may profess, but which 
the mind refuses to appropriate. And, as to its 
being universally received, the fact is, that the 
deepest minds of the Church have either resolved 
it into something different, or emphatically denied 
it. John Scotus, the greatest theosopher of a thou- 
sand years, explains the “ nothing” to be the inef- 
fable, incomprehensible, and inaccessible brightness 


202 ON THE ORIGIN OF THINGS. 


of the divine nature ; and Jacob Boehme, the un- 
fathomable cobbler of Gérlitz, says, “ Many authors 
have written that heaven and earth were created 
out of nothing ; but to me it is strange that, among 
so many excellent men, not one has been found able 
to describe the true ground, seeing the same God 
has been from eternity what he is now. Where 
nothing is, there nothing becomes. . . . God had 
no other material from which he created the world 
than his own essence, no other than himself.” 


In none of the theories thus far discussed can I 
find a solution, which reason will accept, of the 
problem of creation. And still the idea of creation 
is one of those convictions which the human mind 
refuses to part with. Indeed, it is the necessary 
correlate and complement of the idea of God. 
According to Newton’s great word in the “ Prin- 
cipia,” God is a relative term,—‘* Deus est vox 
relativa.” God is no more conceivable without 
creation as the objectivation of the infinite of that 
subject, than a universe is conceivable without God 
as the subject of that object. Angelus Silesius, a 
daring mystic of the seventeenth century, says, 
“JT know that God cannot live a moment without 
me. If I perish, he must for want of me give up 
the ghost. I am as important to him as he to me. 
I help maintain his being as well as he mine.” 


ON THE ORIGIN OF THINGS. 203 


“«That God so blessed is and lives without desire, 
He has from me as I from him acquire.” 

Is there, then, any theory of the origin of being 
which criticism will tolerate, not to say approve ? 

I am not so presumptuous as to think of offering 
any thing which claims to be a solution of the 
problem. I will but venture one or two sugges- 
tions concerning it. 

In the first place, no theory of creation is admis- 
sible which does not exclude the relation of time. 
The idea of an historic genesis must be once for all 
abandoned. It is not an historic, but a metaphysi- 
cal, origin of things which reason contemplates. 
For suppose a beginning in time, the question con- 
fronts us, Why at that particular moment, while 
eternity, a parte ante, awaited the beneficent act? 
If creation was good, why tarried that good? 
Whatever motive may be supposed to have actu- 
ated God in undertaking the work of creation at 
all, must have actuated him from all eternity, since 
God was ever the same. He could not have been 
influenced from without, while nothing existed but 
himself. Vainly does St. Augustine attempt to 
repel the pertinent question of the Manichees, 
“ How came it, all of a sudden, to please your God 
to do what he had not done before through eternal 
time? And what did he before the good work of 
creation ?”” —‘* He made time,” the Father answers. 


204 ON THE ORIGIN OF THINGS. 


If there was time before the creation of the world, 
God made that time, and that was his work, — an 
answer which evades, but does not solve, the question. 
Moreover, it belongs to the idea of God, as Hermo- 
genes! argued long ago, that he is Lord, that he 
rules. ‘“ Deitas,” says Newton, is ‘“‘dominatio Dei, 
non in proprium corpus, sed in subditos.” Deity is 
essentially dominion, and therefore requires sub- 
jects, and must have had them from all eternity. 
Those subjects, it is true, may have been spirits 
formed of his own essence. But then the question 
recurs, If a spiritual world sufficed before the crea- 
tion of the material, why did it not always suf- 
fice, and what need of a material? An historic 
creation —a direct creation with a date, however 
remote — appears to me untenable, confuted more- 
over, as it is, by two axioms to be remembered in 
this connection: No force without stuff, and no 
stuff without force ; and, The quantity of force in 
existence is always the same. 

Another important element in the consideration 
of this question is the necessary character, the 
character of divine necessity, which belongs to 
the idea of creation, viewed in connection with the 
being of God. I mean to say, that creation is in- 
conceivable as an act of divine free-choice, in the 
sense that the God who chose to create might as 


1 Quoted by Strauss, Christliche Glaubenslehre, par. 46. 


ON THE ORIGIN OF THINGS. 205 


well have chosen not to create, or might not have 
created had he so willed. For then might God 
have been other than he is, since the character of 
the being and the character of the will are insep- 
arable. When we say that God might have done 
other than he has done, we say that he might have 
been other than he is, —a proposition which con- 
tradicts itself, since God by definition is necessarily 
God. Creation must be regarded as a necessary 
manifestation of the divine nature, — the inevitable 
going forth of himself, of the Creator, who only by 
going forth of himself becomes real to himself. 
“For,” says the “ Theologia Germanica,” “God 
without creature has essential but not actual be- 
ing.” Moreover, if creation is not necessary, then 
it is fortuitous, —a chance creation, as Spinoza has 
aptly pointed out. “ Necessary and fortuitous,” he 
says, “are opposites; therefore, whoever asserts 
that God might have abstained from creating a 
world, evidently says, in effect, that the world was 
made by chance, as proceeding from a volition 
which might not have been.” The idea of God 
involves creation. “God as spirit,” says Hegel, “is 
essentially self-manifestation.” This is his “idea.” 
God before and without the creation of the world 
is pure abstraction. Without a world, God is not 
God. 

Two difficulties which lie in the way of a rational 


206 -ON THE ORIGIN OF THINGS. 


theory of the origin of things—the diificulty of 
imagining a beginning in time of the sensible world, 
and the difficulty of arbitrariness in the act of crea- 
tion — being thus disposed of, there remains the 
difficulty arising from the supposition of a foreign 
substance distinct from God, and created by God 
in order therefrom to fashion the worlds which his 
fiat called into being. Creation of a foreign sub- 
stance is creation out of nothing,—a view which 
we have seen to be based on no rational concep- 
tion. The idea of a pre-existing material, co- 
eternal with God, we have also seen to be 
inadmissible. Shall we say, then, that God him- 
self is the substance of which the worlds are 
formed? This, in some sense, I am driven to 
admit; but not in the way of Spinozism. Spinoza 
invests Deity with the attribute of extension. Ex- 
tension with him is not an operation, but a quality 
of God. This view obliterates all distinction be- 
tween God and the sensible world, and gives us 
not merely Pantheism, — which, properly defined, is 
still Theism, — but Cosmotheism, Hylotheism. Spi- 
noza is called by Novalis ‘a God-intoxicated man.” 
His system has great fascinations, —it enlarges our 
sense of the divine Presence ; but, after all, it takes 
from the idea of God its most essential element, 
that which religion will never consent to part 
with, — the attribute of lordship. Its logical de- 


ON THE ORIGIN OF THINGS. 207 


fects are obvious; and Schelling’s criticism is just, 
— that, whilst it invests God with the two qualities 
of thought and extension, it brings them into no 
relation. ‘“ Thought and extension are as much 
estranged from each other in the system of Spinoza 
as in that of Descartes. Thought, according to 
him, has no part in the modifications of the ex- 
tended substance, although modification — that is, 
determination —is conceivable only as an act of 
thought. It is only on account of the actual exist- 
ence of things that Spinoza posits modifications in 
his infinite Substance. The things are not products 
of thought; and, were there not things independent 
of his system, there could, from his principles, be 
none deduced.” 

I can see but two ways of escape from Spinozism 
on the one hand, and the ontological dualism of 
Descartes! on the other; to wit, the two theories 
last named in my catalogue, — creation out of spirit, 
and ideal creation. 

Of the former of these, the Monadology of Leib- 
nitz is an apt example. Leibnitz supposes the 
universe to consist of monads or entelechies ; some 
of which are conscious, and some unconscious. 


1 The dualism of Descartes had its origin apparently in the 
supposed necessity of a second substance to serve as the ground 
of extension, which he conceived as a state. But extension may be 
conceived as a continuous act of spirit. 


208 ON THE ORIGIN OF THINGS. 


The conscious, or those which have apperceptions, . 
are spiritual monads, or souls; the unconscious, or 
those which have only perceptions, are simply 
monads. They all exist by momentary fulguration 
from the central monad, which is God. The defect 
of this system is that it fails to account for the 
difference of conscious and unconscious in the 
different orders of monads, which, as momentary 
utterances from one and the same Being, should 
have equal worth. 

Abandoning, then, the momentary fulguration of 
the monads, and substituting for it a momentary 
influx of the life by which they subsist and act, 
let us supplement the theory of Leibnitz with a 
thought of Boehme. Let us suppose that God in 
the beginning created a universe of spirits; that 
some of these spirits by self-will estranged them- 
selves from the Fountain Spirit, until by utter 
defection they lost their selfpossession, their con- 
scious life. Suppose this, and we have the uncon- 
scious monads of Leibnitz. This theory, it is true, 
does not explain the defection of spirits. But de- 
fection is one of the liabilities of that free-will with 
which all spirits must be supposed to be endowed. 
And, certainly, it is a comfort to think that fallen 
spirits can be turned to so good a use as to furnish 
a piéce de résistance for their betters. 

In discussing the origin of things, the existence 


ON THE ORIGIN OF THINGS. 209 


of things has of course been presumed: so much 
has been conceded to ancient universal prejudice. 
Bishop Berkeley, who seems of all philosophers to 
have most completely emancipated himself from 
this prejudice, and the fundamental position of 
whose ontology, in the “Principles of Human 
knowledge,” is “ Hsse est percipi,’ represents the 
ideal creation. For creation there may be, though 
things there are none. Strictly speaking, ideal 
creation is no cosmogony, but simply a theory of 
being, a ratio essendi of the sensible world, and as 
such worthy of all respect; not to be vanquished 
by the grins of coxcombs,! grin they never so know- 
ingly. Creation, according to this view, is the 
immediate action of God on the mind of each per- 
cipient; the world, a continuous communication 
between the infinite Spirit and the finite spirits 
formed of his essence. 


2 “ And coxcombs vanquish Berkeley with a grin.”—Pope. 


14 


VIII. 


THE GOD OF RELIGION, OR THE HUMAN 
GOD. 


HEN we read in the Bible that God made 
man in his own image, we may see in that 
statement a reflex of the fact that man makes God 
in his. It is a necessity of his nature so to do. 
All that we converse with or think of takes its 
character from ourselves. The sensible world of our 
experience is a texture woven on the loom of our 
nerves; the ideal world is a fabric fashioned in the 
mould of our thought. Wethink as weare. And 
so man fashions his God in his own image, endows 
him with the attributes he has learned to respect 
in the wisest and best of human kind. He is right 
in so doing; for what better can any one imagine 
than the highest possible degree of the best known 
kind ? | 
But how, on this principle, account for the fact 
of fetishism? Does man make his God in his own 
likeness when he worships a serpent or a stone? 
The answer is, that man in that stage of develop- 
ment in which alone such worship is possible has 


OR THE HUMAN GOD. 211 


not yet become conscious of his own image; he 
has not yet seized the idea of his humanity ; it has 
not yet occurred to him that man is greater than 
serpent or stone, — greater than the outside world 
of his surrounding. The outside world to him is 
ultimate and omnipotent ; there is nothing behind 
it; he feels its overweight and pressure ; there is a 
mystery in Nature which overawes him, and in 
whatever object that mystery happens to strike his 
imagination most forcibly, — serpent or tiger, or log 
or stone, — that object becomes a god for him. But 
when, with advancing intellectual development, vis- 
ible objects no longer occupy that place in his imagi- 
nation, no longer satisfy his want of a God; when 
driven to seek his God in the invisible, with noth- 
ing to guide him but his own thought, — then, I 
say, it becomes a necessity of his nature to fashion 
his God in his own image. Man is the highest that 
he knows. The highest he can imagine is but an 
enlargement and transfiguration of the human. 
His God must be man, — superhuman, indeed, as 
transcending, in power, wisdom, and goodness, all 
human experience, all actual humanity ; but still 
essentially man. 

The God of religion must be an intelligent 
and moral nature. No being destitute of these 
qualities can fill the place of God for us; and 
of these qualities we can form no conception, 


212 THE GOD OF RELIGION, 


except as they are manifest in human subjects. 
We suppose them indefinitely, infinitely extended, 
and invest our God with their likeness. We can- 
not do otherwise. If we have a God, he must be 
in some sort the reflex of our own nature. Mr. 
Arnold ‘objects to a ‘God who thinks and loves,” 
as being but a “magnified, non-natural man.”?! 
I say this is precisely what the God of religion 
must be, if devotion is to have an intelligible 
object: man without human limitations; intelli- 
gence and love personified. Non-natural, because 
Nature is birth, and God is unborn. 

Nevertheless, it must be confessed that a God in 
our own image is a kind of idol; and the worship 
of that image, without an accompanying conscious- 
ness of its inadequacy, may become idolatry. To 
find the just medium between vague abstraction — 
too vague for devotion—on the one hand, and 
idolatry on the other, is the problem of enlightened 
Theism. The question meets us at the threshold, 
Can we speak of God as person? And in what 
sense can we use that term? I answer, that, so 
far as religious uses are concerned, it is useless 
to talk of a God who is not in some sense person. 
Necessity, Fate, does not make a God; nor 
Power nor Intelligence alone; nor Mr. Arnold’s 
“ Eternal not ourselves that makes for righteous- 





1 “ God and the Bible.” 


OR THE HUMAN GOD. 213 


ness.” 1 These may suggest the origin or express 
the moral order of the universe; but they do not 
constitute a God whom one can pray to, —a God 
whom one would care to worship, or would ever 
draw near to and seek to commune with. The 
God of our devotion, if devotion is any thing more 
than an empty farce, must be, in some sense, per- 
son. And in what sense?? I include in that idea 
intelligent Will, providential care, and a moral 
government of the universe. There may be other 
properties belonging to this idea; but these are 
essential. In this sense, then, the God of religion 
must be person. ‘Deus sine dominio, providentia, 
et causis finalibus,” says Newton, “ nihil aliud est 
quam fatum et natura.” 

But we know how difficult it is to disconnect 

1 “ God andthe Bible.” Strange thata writer who criticises with 


so much acuteness should fail to perceive the hollowness of his own 
definition, which puts a vague abstraction in the place of a living 
Will. 

i 2 Words exercise a controlling influence on thought and belief. 
When turned from their original import, and fixed in some per- 
verted use, they breed misconception and propagate ineradicable 
error. The word “person,” which meant originally a mask, then 
the réle of an actor on the stage, and which might be fitly employed 
to designate the manifestation of a Being in character and action, 
has come in its perversion to signify the conscious self, the human 
ego. That ego is not the deepest in man, but springs from an un- 
known ground. God, as the ground of all individuality, is super- 
personal. He becomes personal to each believer through the 
medium of his own consciousness, as a thousand lenses may at the 
same moment concentrate, each in a separate focus, the rays of 
the sun. 


214 THE GOD OF RELIGION, 


the idea of person from that of form, from the indi- 
vidual human form. All the personality that we 
know any thing about is vested in human forms. 
A person, for us, means a human individual. The 
terms are synonymous. It is difficult not to invest 
Deity with a human form; but the moment we do 
so, we lapse into idolatry. The form becomes an 
idol. If it serves to represent Deity to us, it also 
necessarily misrepresents him. If it helps our con- 
ception, it also necessarily misconceives, — in fact, 
extrudes Deity from our thought, and installs an- 
other in his place. The very use of the masculine 
pronoun in this connection is misleading. It is un- 
avoidable. We must say “He” and “ His,” if we 
speak of God at all; but what subtle illusions and 
idolatries lurk in those pronouns! How strong 
the tendency to conceive of God as not only distinct 
from creation in idea, but as spatially separated from 
creation, —as an individual in space! It is diffi- 
cult, I say, to disconnect the idea of personality from 
that of the human form. And the human form is 
so dear to us, so essential to our affections! The 
imagination insists upon it. It seems scarcely pos- 
sible to be much in love with any thing else, — with 
any thing that does not wear that form in our im- 
agination. And this, I suppose, is the reason why 
Christians have made a God of Christ: they want 
an idol. I can fully appreciate the feeling which 


OR THE HUMAN GOD. 215 


leads men to worship Christ as Deity. God, they 
say, the absolute Being, is to them a thin abstrac- 
tion, too vague and vast and remote and incon- 
ceivable to serve them as an object of worship. 
They want for that purpose a God of their own 
make ; a God who has appeared in human form; a 
God whom they can thoroughly apprehend with 
their idea. They believe in the infinite Father; 
but can better understand and more confidently 
approach and commune with the Son. This is the 
feeling of the great body of Christians everywhere. 
It is very natural, but nevertheless it is idolatry ; 
it is the same feeling which, in ruder times, gave 
birth to graven images of wood and stone to rep- 
resent God. Then it was a sculptured or pictured 
idol; now it is a mental one. It was natural that 
Christians should be led, by veneration for the 
founder of their religion, to worship him as God. 
But when I read in the Gospel that the Christ 
whom they worship was himself a worshipper, — 
was always looking to One who was higher than 
himself, that he prayed to One whom he called 
Father, revealing thereby the conscious limitation 
of his own finite nature, —I cannot but regard such 
worship as idolatry. Idolatry is every worship that 
stops short of the Supreme. 

The God of our devotion must be person; but 
devotion does not require that we invest that per- 


216 THE GOD OF RELIGION, 


son with a human form. It is a trick of the imagi- 
nation, of the image-making faculty, that does this. 
If we give reins to the imagination, it is difficult 
not to confound person with form. But the under- 
standing readily discriminates between the two. 
Take the analogy of the human individual. We 
call the human individual a person. But what 
constitutes personality is not the visible form, 
but the invisible soul which animates that form. 
What that soul is to the individual, that God 
is to the universe of things,—its central Soul, 
the supreme Personality, regent in all and pres- 
ent in all by diffused consciousness, as the human 
soul is present by diffused consciousness in every 
part of the human organism. The human organ- 
ism is a world in little, of which the soul is its 
God. The organic Whole, the world in its en- 
tireness, is a body of which God is the soul, — not 
identical with the body in form, and not separated 
from it in space. This is the best conception I can 
form of Deity; conscious, nevertheless, how inade- 
quate all human conceptions of Deity must be. In 
religion, it is a matter of less moment that the in- 
tellect should form a perfect conception, than that 
the heart should have perfect conviction. Happily, 
the eternal Mystery, which eludes the efforts of the 
most developed understanding that seeks to com- 
prehend it, condescends to the crudest and most 


OR THE HUMAN GOD. 217 


infantile mind that is satisfied with believing. 
“Thou hast hid these things from the wise and 
prudent, and revealed them unto babes,” is as true 
of the being of God as it is of all his counsels. 

Here, as in all things, the intellect has its rights ; 
but the office of the intellect in relation to God is 
not to attempt to fathom the idea, but to clear it 
of what is false and unworthy, —to correct that 
idolatrous tendency which would make the infinite 
and inscrutable altogether such an one as ourselves. 
This tendency lurks in the characters we ascribe to 
him, when even in themselves and with proper 
limitations those characters are worthy and true, 
—are the best conceptions we can form of the 
Divine. 

For example, we call God father, and we have 
the highest authority for so doing. The most 
touching and inspiring things that have been said 
of him by wise and holy men connect themselves 
with this epithet: ‘Like as a father pitieth his 
children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him.” 
What more endearing, encouraging, reconciling! 
“Our Father which art in heaven.” How much of 
Godhead — of the beauty and loveableness of God- 
head —that phrase conveys! God must be con- 
ceived as Father, in order that we may get the 
nearest access to him, and the best enjoyment of his 
idea. The love of God must be conceived as pater- 


218 THE GOD OF RELIGION, 


nal, in order that we may conceive of God’s loving 
at all. The idea of a rigid and unchangeable order 
of events, comprehending all our destinies and 
yielding now joy and now sorrow, according as 
our several spheres are adjusted to the general plan, 
does not satisfy us, — gives us really no God: it is 
too impersonal. We want to believe that the Being 
whose offspring we are has a care of his creatures, 
not only collectively but individually; perceives 
their necessities, feels them, ministers to them, 
making all things with set purpose work for their 
good. And this satisfaction we have when we 
think of God as father; this faith we express when, 
with a full understanding of its import, we employ 
that term. Still, it becomes us to remember that 
the term, after all, is a figure of speech, not a literal 
fact; and that the figure which likens the eternal 


Power to an earthly parent may be pushed beyond: 


its just application. It is applicable only as ex- 
pressing a Providence whose motive power is love. 
It is carried too far when it tempts us to impute to 
the Ruler of worlds the indulgent weakness of an 
earthly parent, who would spare his child all sorrow 
and suffering, and saturate him with perpetual 
felicities. The fatherhood of God consists with a 
great deal of misery and helplessness and want and 
distress ; it consists with extreme suffering ; it con- 
sists with fearful inequalities of fortune; with the 


OR THE HUMAN GOD. 219 


existence of myriads who are born diseased and. 
maimed and crippled, and drag their life through 
years of pain, without apparently one full draught 
of the joy of being. We call God father, but 
misery abounds ; we believe him omnipotent, but 
misery continues. We think, Would an earthly 
father be willing to see his children suffer, and 
suffer hopelessly, who had power to help and re- 
lieve ? And, when we look for explanation to the 
heavenly Father, he hides himself in thick darkness. 
And we have to modify and complement our idea 
of the fatherhood of God with other aspects and 
facts of the divine nature ; and to learn that, though 
God is a father, it is a fatherhood which earthly 
relations fail to pattern, and which earthly experi- 
ence fails to interpret. 

Again, we call God moral governor and judge, 
and we are right in so doing. There is nothing 
more definitive in Deity than the moral jurisdiction 
which the Ruler of all exercises over moral natures. 
All religions recognize this moral government. 
Whatever else they may teach or fail to teach con- 
cerning God, they all inculcate the belief that he 
tries and judges men by their actions ; recompensing 
good with good, and evil with evil. But here again 
it must be remembered that we are dealing with 
figures, and not with literal truths. The terms 
“moral governor” and “judge” are figures of 


220 THE GOD OF RELIGION, 


speech derived from human relations, which fit the 
being and action of God in only one point, and are 
likely to mislead if taken as literal statements of 
divine operations. The point in which they fit is 
the fact, that, by the constitution of man and of 
things, well-doing is productive of well-being, and 
sin of suffering. This is all that is meant, or should 
be meant, by the moral government of God. The 
moment we exceed this, and transfer human meth- 
ods to divine retributions, the terms ‘moral govy- 
ernor’’ and “‘judge”’ are found to be inapplicable. 
The judgments of men are an action on each par- 
ticular case ; those of God inhere in the case itself. 
Those of man are after the act; those of God are 
before the birth of the actor, from the foundation 
of the world. There is no trial and no judgment of 
evil-doers; their penalty is merely the relation of 
the seed to the fruit. Every act that a man per- 
forms as a moral agent is seed cast into the ground. 
When he acts a crime, he sows nightshade instead 
of corn, and his punishment is that he reaps poison 
instead of bread. The penalty is not always imme- 
diate and not always apparent, and human impa- 
tience is often disappointed in its expectation of 
visible retributions, and looks in vain for some 
stunning demonstration of divine vengeance. Here 
is an innocent man persecuted and trampled on by 
some unrighteous oppressor ; here, one tortured and 


OR THE HUMAN GOD. 221 


put to death for difference of opinion; here, again, 
a conspiracy of swindlers in office, banded together 
to defraud the government they are sworn to serve, 
and enrich themselves by enormous plunder. Will 
it please Omnipotence to give attention to these 
outrages, and send a swift thunder-bolt to smite 
the transgressors? Omnipotence attends; but as to 
the thunder-bolt the answer is, ‘“‘ Thou thoughtest 
I was altogether such an one as thyself,” and must 
needs blaze forth in flaming fury at every enormity 
which my creatures perpetrate. “My ways are not 
as your ways.” I make my sun to shine and my 
rain to fall alike on the evil and the good, and my 
thunder-bolts strike indifferently the just and the 
unjust. What need of thunder-bolts to smite the 
transgressor? The seed was planted when the deed 
was done, and no power in heaven or on earth can 
prevent the ripening of the penal fruit. The 
mills of God grind slowly, but they grind. Long- 
suffering turns the wheel, and patient Justice 
appoints the result, tribulation and anguish to 
the evil-doer, and peace and contentment to the 
good. 

These are illustrations of what is true and what 
is false in man’s propensity to fashion God in his 
own image. The tendency is inevitable. Man 
must have a God in his own image, if he have one 
at all, or one that really answers to that name and 


222 THE GOD OF RELIGION, 


need. The God of religion must be human. But 
this human God must be infinitely human, — man, 
without man’s infirmities and bounds; personal, 
without individuality ; the Father, without pa- 
rental doting; the moral Ruler, without vindic- 
tiveness. 

In religion, it is sentiment that furnishes the 
stuff; and the intellect, that, by modifying and elimi- 
nating, gives the form. All that is essential in our 
idea of God we get, not from the understanding, 
but from the heart; and all that is essential in it is 
secured to us by the heart’s perpetual need. Phi- 
losophy may assail the conception, and science may 
disown the idea; but they furnish nothing that 
ean fill its place. The pure in heart will still see 
God. The pure heart is a little child that knows 
its Father, and will hear of no substitute. In the 
morning of creation, it sought and found the unseen 
Friend, when “ Enoch walked with God.” From 
the ‘house of bondage,” in after years, it sent up 
a sigh, and received for answer the great word, 
“Tam.” In the noontide of history, it paused to 
listen, and learned to say, “Our Father in heaven.” 
And when time is old, when Science has fulfilled 
its career, and Speculation repeated its ever-recur- 
ring circle, and both have confessed their incom- 
petence alike to grasp or refute; when prophecies 


OR THE HUMAN GOD. 923 


fail, and tongues have ceased, and fancied knowl- 
edge of the Absolute vanished away, — the heart, 
the eternal child, with invincible faith, will still 
rejoice in Him “in whom we live and move and 
have our being.” 


IX. 
DUALISM AND OPTIMISM. 


1 = Nase differing views of the universe divide the 
belief of speculative minds. 

I. The universe the sole product of a single, 
extramundane, intelligent Will. II. The universe 
the joint product and battle-ground of two opposing 
Powers. III. The universe the self-manifestation 
of an immanent, diffusive Soul. IV. The universe 
a self-subsisting, independent Reality. — Theism, 
Ditheism or Dualism, Pantheism, Atheism. 

Theism is the view which lies nearest to us, as the 
common belief of the Christian world. But Theism, 
referring as it does all facts and events to a single 
supreme Power, encounters a difficulty in human 
experience which faith may adjust to its own satis- 
faction, but which philosophy is troubled to explain 
to the satisfaction of the understanding. 

The difficulty is this: that while by supposition 
the Will that creates and ordains is one, the mani- 
festations not only differ but conflict. The unity 
affirmed of the Cause is not apparent in the opera- 


DUALISM AND OPTIMISM. 225 


tion. The Power over all is conceived to be omni- 
potent, omni-beneficent, willing only the best; but 
the product is not, so far as we can see, that per- 
fect world which ought to result from such a source. 
The Power is affirmed to be absolutely good, but 
the world abounds in evil. How from the one pure 
Source can contraries flow? How from the one 
Good can evil proceed? No question in theology, 
and none in philosophy, goes deeper than this. No 
problem has proved more perplexing. 

The old Hebrew theology, as represented by the 
later Isaiah, was content to refer the evil with the 
good to the arbitrary power of Jehovah, whose 
simple will sufficed to justify the one as well as the 
other. ‘‘I am Jehovah, and there is none else. I 
form the light and create darkness ; I make peace 
and create evil.” It is not till after the Captivity 
that Judaism exhibits other views of the origin of 
evil. 

Meanwhile, to the Aryan mind in its Persian 
development, the contemplation of a world where 
good and evil appear to contend for the mastery 
had suggested the existence of a principle of Evil, 
—a malignant being opposed to the good, sole cause 
of all mischief in the world of bodies and the world 
of souls. Two self-subsistent, independent forces, 
a power that creates and a power that destroys, a 


power that blesses and a power that harms, — this 
15 


226 DUALISM AND OPTIMISM. 


is the theory of the universe known in philosophy 
as Dualism, in religion as Parsism. ‘Traces of it 
appear in the good and bad deities of the polythe- 
istic religions; but its consummation, the sharp 
distinction of a good and an evil power, — the one 
to be sought, obeyed, worshipped, the other to be 
renounced and shunned, — is the prime and dis- 
tinguishing feature of Parsism, the religion of 
ancient Persia, from which sprung the Manicheism, 
so threatening to Christianity in the fourth and 
fifth centuries, and of which a remnant still sur- 
vives in the Parsis of India. 

Parsism ranks with the oldest of existing religions, 
and, though greatly modified and perverted in its 
subsequent developments, still claims for its founder 
Zarathustra, — better known as Zoroaster, — one 
of the leaders of the human race, whose name at 
the distance of more than three thousand years, 
like that of Abraham, his Semitic compeer, repre- 
sents a hero of faith. Like Abraham, Zarathustra 
repudiated the idol-worship of his time, and initi- 
ated a religion of the spirit. In the thirteenth 
century before Christ, according to Dunker, on a 
mountain consecrated to the ancient idolatrous 
worship of fire, the reformer appeared before an 
assembly of the nation convened for the celebra- 
tion of an annual sacrifice, and called on king and 
people to renounce ‘the religion of lies,” and em- 


DUALISM AND OPTIMISM. 227 


brace the truth of the spirit as he should declare it, 
Bunsen! compares the scene to that in which the 
prophet Elijah refuted the priests of Baal in the 
presence of the people of Israel. ‘‘ Choose ye this 
day whom ye will serve, ” — Ahura-Mazda the wise 
Lord, or the false divinities of the lying priests of 
fire. “ Two spirits there are,” he says, “‘ originally 
and fundamentally different, —a twin pair from 
the beginning, a good and an evil. They rule 
in thought, word, and deed; choose ye between 
them.” 

We have here the first historic enunciation of 
the principle of dualism, 1300 B. c., at the lowest 
computation ; according to some authorities, espe- 
cially Bunsen, many centuries earlier.” 


But the principle itself, or the view of Nature in 
which it originated, is earlier still. It lay in the 
ideas and the corresponding worship which Zoro- 
aster found established in Iran, and which it was 
his mission to reform. That elder religion con- 
sisted in the worship of fire and light. These 
types, while insisting on the worship of spirit, 
Zoroaster retained by way of compromise, as sym- 
bols of truth and good. Hence sprung the religion 


1 Gott in der Geschichte. 
2 Bunsen places Zoroaster, at the latest, 2500 8. ¢. See Gott 
in der Geschichte, Vol. II. p. 78. 


228 DUALISM AND OPTIMISM. 


of Parsism, one of the notable and representative 
religions of the world. In virtue of its ethical 
character, I reckon it among the revealed religions, 
although less entitled to that designation than the 
rest of its class, on account of its mixed origin, — 
not being like Jehovism or Mohammedism, the 
product of pure reflection, but admitting in con- 
junction with the inner light an element of natural- 
ism. It has its root in a vivid sense of the primal 
antithesis of Nature, — the antithesis of light and 
darkness. No wonder that this eldest and sharp- 
est of all antagonisms should assume in primitive 
thought a typical significance. The religion of 
Tran made it the symbol of moral good and evil. 
These opposites were represented by two antago- 
nist powers, — Ahura-Mazda or Ormazd, the wise 
Lord, and Angra-Mainyus or Ahriman, the evil 
Spirit. Ormazd, the source of all good, dwells in 
perfect light. Ahriman, the source of all evil, 
resides in the deepest darkness. The visible world 
derives its character from the mutual relation and 
interaction of these two principles. Its origin, for- 
tunes, and final consummation result from their 
antagonism. Spiegel, translator of the Avesta, 
has sketched the orthodox cosmology of Parsism, 
of which I here present the more salient features. 


From the beginning the two powers were mutu- 


DUALISM AND OPTIMISM. 229 


ally abhorrent, though separated the one from the 
other by a boundless interval of vacant space. 
Ahriman became aware of the existence of his 
opposite; and, maddened by the sight of the 
strange apparition, rushed forward to destroy it. 
Ormazd, by virtue of his omniscience, had known 
of the existence of Ahriman, and saw in him an 
antagonist who must be overcome, but whose con- 
quest would prove a difficult task ; the two being 
equal in strength, and each supreme in his own 
domain. Now, it belongs to the nature of Ormazd 
to think before acting ; to that of Ahriman to act 
before thinking. Consequently, Ormazd debated 
with himself the means of success in this impend- 
ing warfare. He foresaw that a present attack 
might fail, but that victory was assured by post- 
poning the conflict. 

Meanwhile, he created beings adapted to his 
ends; and Ahriman on his part did the same: 
that is, he opposed to each of the creations of 
Ormazd a corresponding negative, —for Ahriman 
is incapable of independent creations. Three 
thousand years were consumed in these produc- 
tions. At the end of that period, Ormazd per- 
suaded Ahriman to enter into a compact by which 
it was agreed to defer their battle for nine thousand 
years. These, added to the three thousand which 
preceded, make up the twelve thousand of the 


{ 


230 DUALISM AND OPTIMISM. 


world’s duration. When the treaty was concluded, 
Ormazd uttered the prayer which Parsism hallows 
with the term “ Honover.” Then Ahriman, who, 
as usual, had acted before thinking, in agreeing to 
the treaty, perceived that he had been outwitted, 
and retréated, in his rage and terror, into the abyss 
of darkness, where he remained in a state of stupor 
for three thousand years. Ormazd improved the 
interval with new creations, in which he was as- 
sisted by certain spirits,— his former creatures, 
The earth with its belongings, previously called 
into being, but subsisting in heaven, was now let 
down into the vacant space which separates the 
kingdom of Ormazd from the realms of Ahriman. 
There it serves as an outpost and fortress to pro- 
tect the world of light from the powers of darkness. 
When half the term assigned for the world’s dura- 
tion had elapsed, Ahriman, awaking from his long 
torpor at the instigation of his devs, began to bestir 
himself, and to make his preparations for the final 
conflict. Emerging from his darkness, he finds the 
earth placed between him and the hostile territory. 
He bores a hole through its bottom, and so reaches 
its surface. There he succeeds in seducing the first 
human pair, Meschia and Meschiane, from their 
allegiance to Ormazd, and thereby obtains a limited 
dominion over their posterity. All the imperfec- 
tions and woes of life, all noxious creatures, all 
earthly evils and plagues, are his creation. 


DUALISM AND OPTIMISM. 231 


The earth, then, is the proper arena and battle- 
ground of these antagonistic principles. Inferior 
natures serve by compulsion their several authors ; 
but man is free to choose which side he will em- 
brace, which master he will serve. Neutral he 
cannot remain ; he must declare himself for one or 
the other party, and abide the consequences of his 
decision. It is believed by the Parsis that Ahri- 
man, originally the equal of Ormazd in power, has 
long since ceased to be so. He is constantly losing 
ground ; so that when the nine thousand years of 
the compact are ended, and the final battle is 
fought, the good principle is sure to obtain an 
easy victory. 


A different view of the origin of evil is enter- 
tained by a sect of the Parsis, called the Zervanites, 
as represented by the Arabian, Asch Schaharastani. 
According to him, a portion of the Persians believed 
in an aboriginal being, whom they named Zrvyana 
Akerana (endless time). Zrvana offered a sacrifice 
in order to obtain a son; but a doubt arose in his 
mind whether a son would be given him. From 
this doubt sprang Ahriman: Ormazd was the fruit 
of the sacrifice. The father determined to confer 
the rule on the first-born.. Ormazd, yet unborn, 
became aware of this intent, and imparted his 


932 DUALISM AND OPTIMISM. 


knowledge to his unborn brother. Whereupon 
Ahriman broke through the maternal womb, and 
came first into the world. Nevertheless, Zrvana 
looked upon Ormazd as the rightful senior, and 
accorded to him the right of primogeniture. But 
rot to do injustice to Ahriman, he gave him the 
dominion for nine thousand years, at the expira- 
tion of which the elder brother is to have the 
supremacy. 


Of the whole cycle of twelve thousand years, 
which both systems accept as the allotted term of 
the world’s duration, one-half had elapsed when 
evil appeared on the earth. The third quarter 
extends from the appearance of Ahriman to the 
birth of Zoroaster, and the reformation of the na- 
tional religion. The servants of Ahriman, aware 
of the expected appearance of this prophet, ex- 
erted themselves to prevent his birth; and when 
that was found impossible, to destroy him when 
born. Rescued by a series of miracles, at the age 
of thirty he is brought into communion with Or- 
mazd, and receives from him the revelation, which 
he is instructed to communicate to Vistaspa, King 
of Bactria, and to the rest of mankind. Accord- 
ingly, Zoroaster repairs to the court of Vistaspa, 
and, by miraculous demonstration of his mission, 
induces that monarch to accept the revelation of 


DUALISM AND OPTIMISM. 233 


the Avesta. This revelation is conceived by the 
Parsis as a weapon which acts on evil spirits 
—the agents of Ahriman — when presented to 
them, as material weapons act on mortal bodies. 
It consists, in part, of practical rules of life for the 
conduct of believers, and partly of instructions 
concerning the life to come,—its rewards and 
punishments, —and concerning the issue of the 
conflict between Ormazd and Ahriman, and the 
end of the world. 


As the final struggle approaches, Ahriman, con- 
scious of imminent peril to his realm, exerts him- 
self in convulsive efforts to recover the ground he 
has lost, and to harry his adversary. Hence, all 
the evils of the latter times, especially wars, op- 
pressions, and persecutions of the faithful. To 
mitigate these sorrows, Ormazd sends every thou- 
sand years a new prophet, who brings from heaven 
some further dispensation of the Avesta, and in- 
tercalates in the midst of the evil years a tempo- 
rary reign of justice and peace. The last of these 
expected prophets will be Soziosh, of the seed of 
Zoroaster, but born of a virgin; who, when he ap- 
pears, will abolish the evils inflicted by Ahriman, 
and, with the assistance of seven — or, according to 
the Bundehesh, fifteen — of the most distinguished 
saints of all time, precursors of the final judgment, 


234 DUALISM AND OPTIMISM. 


will establish a millennium of blessing. One sign 
of its approach will be a diminution of animal 
desire, to that extent that men will no longer care 
to eat. Then comes the resurrection of the dead, 
the accomplishment of which will oceupy a period 
of fifty-seven years. After that the general con- 
flagration, when “the elements shall melt with fer- 
vent heat, and the earth and the works that are 
therein shall be burned up.” The whole race of 
men will pass through the flames, that all may be 
thoroughly purged of their sins. The righteous 
will experience no discomfort in the process; the 
godless, on the contrary, will suffer excruciating 
torments. But, purified by suffering, they, too, 
will survive the fiery trial, and come forth whole 
and happy; the universe will be freed from all 
evil. Ahriman is then defeated, hell destroyed, 
and Ormazd and his blessed family of spirits alone 
remain. 


These are the main features of the Zoroastrian 
cosmology, with which the ethical system of the 
Parsis entirely corresponds. According to the life 
which the individual leads in this world will be his 
condition in the next. He whose thoughts and 
words, as well as deeds, are pure and true is ac- 
cepted as a votary of Ormazd, and will be received 
into the fellowship of the spirits of light. Whoever 


DUALISM AND OPTIMISM. 235 


was an adversary of Ormazd in this world will be 
surrendered to Ahriman, and have his abode in the 
deepest darkness in the world to come. On the 
third day after his death, the character and life of 
each individual are brought to judgment. The 
soul must repair to the bridge Z'schinvad, where 
the ways that lead, the one to heaven the other to 
hell, diverge. There are seated the judges of the 
dead, who weigh all their deeds in a balance. If 
the good preponderate, the soul continues its jour- 
ney over the bridge and arrives in Paradise, where 
it is welcomed by all the just and lives in joy and 
blessedness until the final judgment. If the good 
and evil deeds exactly balance each the other, 
the soul is sent to a place called Hamestegan, 
where neither reward nor punishment awaits it. 
But when the soul of the evil-doer, on the third 
day after death, arrives at the bridge Tschinvad 
and attempts to pass over, it seems so narrow and 
dangerous that the soul is seized with dizziness and 
tumbles into the abyss beneath, where it is received 
with taunts and scoffs by Ahriman and his devs, 
and tortured by them till the day of judgment. 
That the Parsi, if possible, may be saved from this 
doom, he is early instructed in the truths of his 
religion; and at the age of fifteen is invested with 
the Kosti, the sacred cord, in token of his formal 
reception into the communion of his faith. He 


236 DUALISM AND OPTIMISM. 


then takes upon himself the responsibilities of life 
and the duties of religion. He is a member of the 
invisible Church of the faithful, whereby the good 
deeds of others, and especially of his ancestry, re- 
dound to his spiritual benefit. 


Of ancient religions, Parsism is that in which 
moral good and evil are most sharply distinguished. 
In no other religion is the antagonism of a good 
and an evil principle so fundamental to its organ- 
ism and so conspicuous in all its developments. In 
fact, whatever of a like antagonism appears in sub- 
sequent religions — especially in Judaism, Islamism, 
Christianity — has descended directly or indirectly 
from this Persian original. The Mosaic religion 
exhibits little or nothing of it previous to the re- 
turn of the Jews from their Captivity, when they 
appear as a Persian colony in Palestine. 


A striking illustration of the change which inter- 
course with Persia had wrought in the views of the 
Hebrew people may be found in the different ac- 
counts that are given in the Bible of the census 
ordered by David of the population of his realm. 
The earlier narrative in the second Book of Samuel 
ascribes the institution of this census to the prompt- 
ing of Jehovah; the later, written after the Cap- 
tivity, imputes it to the instigation of Satan. 


DUALISM AND OPTIMISM. 237 


Another proof of Persian influence is the fact that 
while the Old Testament has very little to say 
about the Devil (for the serpent in the Garden of 
Eden does not, as vulgarly supposed, represent the 

vil principle; and Satan in the Book of Job is 
not the Satan of the later theology, but one of the 
sons of God), —that while the Old Testament has 
very little to say about the Devil, the New Testa- 
ment is full of him. 

According to the doctrine of the Avesta, every 
man is a follower either of Ormazd or Ahriman. 
Neutrality is impossible: to one or the other party 
every soul, and indeed every creature, belongs. A 
line of unbending rigidity and unchangeable deter- 
mination bisects the universe, disposing all that is 
genial and healthful and beautiful and lovable — 
good men and women, useful or harmless animals 
or plants —on one side, and arraying all bad people 
and noxious creatures, snakes and scorpions, and 
poisonous plants, on the other. 

But man, and especially the Parsi, is vowed by 
his origin to fight the battle of Ormazd against his 
enemy. Hence, one of the good works of Parsism 
is to till and plant the earth with corn and whole- 
some fruit; and another is to hunt out and put to 
death all noxious and dangerous animals. 

The religion is encumbered with a complex 
ritual; its purifications, its fasts and other formali- 


238 DUALISM AND OPTIMISM. 


ties, impose a heavy burden on the worshipper. 
Still it is emphatically a moral religion; of all re- 
ligions except the Christian the most moral. And 
the fundamental article of its ethical code is truth, 
the soul of all morality. Truth-telling and truth- 
acting is the duty, above all others, enjoined by 
the Avesta. Comparing this religion with other 
religions of antiquity, one is tempted to say that 
truth is a Persian invention. Accordingly, fidelity 
in contracts is one of the distinguishing virtues of 
the Parsi people, and has given them the high po- 
sition they occupy in modern India, — where they 
have a flourishing settlement, and where the Parsi 
merchant holds, among all the nationalities repre- 
sented in that land, the foremost rank in wealth 
and commercial repute. 


I return to the principle of dualism embodied in 
the Persian faith. From the Zoroastrian religion it 
passed into Judaism, and thence into Christendom. 
The pseudo-Christian idea of the Devil is its lineal 
and legitimate fruit. I call it pseudo-Christian ; for 
though Jesus employed the term, or, if you please, 
the conception, as a given article in the mental fur- 
niture of his time, he by no means accents it in a 
way to authorize its acceptance as a necessary con- 
stituent of the Christian creed. It is scarcely any 
longer regarded as such. Of Christian beliefs once 


DUALISM AND OPTIMISM. 239 


universally received, and never so much as ques- 
tioned, there is none which seems to have passed 
into such general discredit, none which is losing so 
fast its hold of the popular mind. The Devil is 
still a name to swear by, and still, as a figure of 
speech, represents a spiritual fact, but no longer 
stands for an ontological or statistical one. There 
is something very curious, and not easily explained, 
in this noiseless and imperceptible dropping out 
from the mind and creed of mankind of a once 
universal and rooted conviction. For nearly two 
thousand years the belief in Satan was as fixed as 
any belief whatsoever in the mind of Christen- 
dom. For more than a thousand, the doctrine of the 
Atonement was not, as modern Orthodoxy con- . 
ceives it, a satisfaction of divine Justice, but was 
understood as a satisfaction of Satan, to whom the 
world was supposed to have become forfeit by sin. 
The early Church, among its regular officials, had 
always one whose business it was to fight the Devil 
in the person of any of his subordinates who might 
take possession of a human subject. In every 
church the exorcist was as much a stated function- 
ary as the deacon or the priest. The idea of Satan 
was not one of those which the Protestant Refor- 
mation repudiated, as it did that of purgatory and 
the efficacy of the mass. Luther, the arch-reformer, 
insisted upon it, urged it as one of the fundamentals 


a 
7 


240 DUALISM AND OPTIMISM. 


of the Christian system. The Devil was as real to 
him as the Pope, or Tetzel, or Dr. Eck. In his 
Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians he 
says: ‘* We are all subject to the Devil with our 
bodies and our estate. We are but guests in a 
world of which he is the prince and the god. The 
bread we eat, the water we drink, the garments we 
wear, the very air, and all by which we live in the 
flesh, is subject to his control.” 

From that time forward, until a comparatively 
recent date, Protestants — clergy and laity, with ~ 
few exceptions — have assumed the existence of such 
a being with as little hesitation as they assumed the 
existence of God. They would as soon have ques- 
. tioned the latter as the former. Within this cen- 
tury ministers have been known to pray for his 
conversion, either hoping with Origen that such a 
consummation might be a part of the divine scheme, 
or holding with Burns, that, would he “tak a 
thought and men’,” he “aiblins might” “ still hae 
a stake.” 

The belief in Satanic agency had a fearfully 
tragic side, in the contemplation of which one 
shudders at the awful and uncontrollable power of 
religious ideas over unenlightened human nature. 
The long delusion of witchcraft with the thence re- 
sulting persecutions, which desolated Christendom 
with ghastliest horrors and countless deaths, was 


DUALISM AND OPTIMISM. 241 


the natural outcome of this belief. Those terrors 
which darkened and perplexed the life of former 
generations have passed away. Like spectres be- 
gotten of nightmare and the dark, with the dawn 
of a new intellectual day 


“The flocking shadows pale 
Troop to the infernal jail.” 


Satan, the head and sovereign of this spectral 
realm, is passing from the fear and faith of man- 
kind, and a load whose agonizing pressure we but 
faintly conceive has been lifted from the mind. 

The tragedy over, the farce succeeds. Where 
the fathers trembled, the children jest. Whom 
Luther declared to be the Lord of this earth is 
pursued with Lucianic derision as he goes the way 
of the Olympian gods, chased by inexorable science 
into the vast nowhere of the phantom world: no 
longer owned by enlightened theology; for pur- 
poses of fiction even, no longer available. The 
genius of Goethe has enucleated the true interior 
import of the theological Devil, — the spirit of ne- 
gation. ‘Culture ” — says Mephistopheles to the 
witch who finds him very different from her idea, 
— “culture that licks the world smooth has ex- 
tended itself even to the Devil. The Northern 
phantom is now no more seen; in vain you look 
for horns, and tail, and claws.” And when the 


witch breaks out, — 
16 


242 DUALISM AND OPTIMISM. 


“T shall lose my wits with joy, I fear, 
To see Squire Satan once more here,” — 


he answers, “ Woman, I forbid that name!” 
Witch: “Why, what harm is in the word?” 
Mephistopheles : — 


“Tn the fable-book it was long since scored ; 
But human kind therefrom have little gain ; 
The Evil One is gone, but evil ones remain.” 

The real Devil, as figured in Mephistopheles, is 
“the spirit that denies,” the opposing, unbelieving, 
bitter, mocking spirit,— the spirit whose idiom is 
sarcasm, whose life is a sneer. There is nothing 
more alien from Godhead, nothing more undivine, 
more antagonistic to all divineness, than such a 
spirit ; whose natural symbol is the ape, and whose 
theological expression is “the sin against the Holy 
Ghost.” 


Satan has disappeared from the realm of accred- 
ited existences, but that which Satan stood for 
remains; and much as we rejoice to see, in the 
language of the Apocalypse, “the old Serpent 
which is called the Devil and Satan,” “cast out,” 
philosophy misses a convenient answer to the ques- 
tion, “ Whence and why the evil that is in the 
world?” The idea of Satan was the eldest solu- 
tion of that question. A very convenient solution 
it was; an easy way of disposing of every noxious 


DUALISM AND OPTIMISM. 243 


and painful experience, of every calamity and mis- 
hap, and all moral evil as well,—to refer it, as 
Luther did, to the one arch-enemy of human kind, 
Men seemed to themselves to explain the existence 
of evil by personifying it. 

Reject as we may the personification, the fact 
remains ; what the world calls evil remains; and 
the questions, Whence? and Why’? still haunt the 
philosophic mind. How reconcile the existence of 
evil with the being and rule of a wise and good 
God, almighty to effect what love proposes and 
wisdom plans? 

There is but one answer to this question. What 
love proposes, and wisdom plans, must needs be 
good. This fundamental truth of practical reason 
is the only solution of the problem. In the view 
and intent of a Being of infinite wisdom and good- 
ness there can be no evil. Such a Being sees, and 
knows, and does only good. What we call evil, 
therefore, the evil of our experience, when referred 
to its source, has precisely the same character with 
that which we call good. If God is good, and if all 
that is proceeds from him, there is no evil. Suffer- 
ing, distress, privation, woes of every kind; but no 
evil. All is good in its origin and purpose, and 
must eventually approve itself as good in human 
experience. 

This summary solution of the problem is not a 


244 DUALISM AND OPTIMISM. 


conclusion reached, or that ever could be reached, by 
reasoning, as theologians have commonly reasoned, 
from the world to its author. Had we no other 
knowledge of God, and no other way of arriving at 
the truth of his being than that which is given us 
in the contemplation of the world as it is, inferring 
from visible effects the invisible cause, I doubt if 
human wit would ever have reasoned out a Being 
all wise and good from the study of nature and life. 
Take the world as it is, with all its contradictions, 
woes, and wrongs; and without other light what 
sort of God would the contemplation of such a 
world present? Possibly, infinite Power; but not, 
I think, infinite Wisdom and Love. If we honestly 
reason from effect to cause, whatever is in the 
effect must be in the cause; whatever of imperfec- 
tion and evil there is in the one must be in the 
other. There is no evading this obvious truth. 
The only way to vindicate the goodness of God, in 
view of the seeming ills of life, is to reason the 
other way, from the cause to the effect. We know, 
or believe that we know, the divine Cause. We 
have the idea of a perfect Being, an all-wise and 
utterly beneficent God. Starting with this, and 
reasoning from this to the facts of life, we conclude 
that all that is and befalls must be good, —good 
in its purpose, and good in its end. 

To the question, then, How evil consists with 


DUALISM AND OPTIMISM. 245 


the goodness of God? I answer flatly, It does not 
consist with the goodness of God. One or the 
other of these conceptions must be abandoned. 
Either there is no God, such as we figure him, or 
there is no evil. Believing in a God on the 
strength of his idea in my mind, independently of 
the argument from Nature, I say there is no evil. 
Pain and suffering in abundance, but no evil. For 
only that is really and absolutely evil which is evil - 
in its cause and effect, in its origin and end; evil in 
all its issues, evil for evermore. Nothing in God’s 
universe answers to that condition. 

Obviously, if we consider it, that which we call 
evil is as much a necessary part of the Divine order 
as that which we call good, or it would not be in 
the Divine order at all. And obviously, the Divine 
order by its very definition must tend to good. 
Without that tendency to good in human things, 
which even the Atheist admits, the world would 
long since have ended in ruin. And the tendency 
to good, for ever accumulating its blest results, im- 
plies perpetual growth in good, perpetual progress 
toward perfection. And endless progress toward 
perfection is surely a greater good than a perfect 
finite state. 

But the stimulus to progress must come from 
conscious imperfection, want, and pain. Picture 
to yourself a world without a flaw, without a want, 


246 DUALISM AND OPTIMISM. 


without a pang; a world in which no storm ever 
darkens the sky, no struggle ever taxes the will, 
and no discomfort ever ruffles the breast; a world 
in which no battle is ever fought, and consequently 
no victory ever won; in which there is nothing to 
be desired, and consequently nothing to hope, — 
imagine such a world, and what have you? A 
state of perfect blessedness? Nay, but a state of 
- pleasureless torpor and measureless ennui. No 
dream, no fancy which the heart of man indulges, 
is so utterly baseless as: that of unbroken and un- 
qualified enjoyment,—a world without foes, and 
fightings, and pains. Suffering is the price we pay 
for enjoyment; disaster, the price of safety; diffi- 
culty and danger, the price of progress. It needed 
all the calamities that have ever befallen, to bring 
mankind thus far in the onward way of their des- 
tiny. It needs all the woes and sorrows of life to 
flavor its happiness. All the dark side of it is in- 
dispensable to constitute its bright side. 

To say all in a word: it follows with logical 
necessity from the very idea of God, that the world 
of his making and ruling must be the best possible 
world. 


Leibnitz was the first to take this ground of un- 
flinching Optimism, the first to base his theodicy, or 
vindication of the goodness of God, on the doctrine 


DUALISM AND OPTIMISM. 247 


that the actual world is the best possible world. 
He saw that the honor of God is involved in the 
absolute perfection of his creation, and that, if the 
world were not the best possible, the failure or 
neglect to make it the best possible would imply a 
defect in its author of ability or will, of power or 
goodness; that, consequently, its author would not 
be the perfect Being affirmed by, and essential to, 
Theism. And since the world as it is is the best 
possible world, it follows that the evil that is in it, 
and which forms an inseparable constituent part of 
it, is necessary to make it the best possible. 

Moral evil as well as physical is included by 
Leibnitz in this view. The world is a whole so 
connected, compacted, and dovetailed in all its 
parts, that nothing in it could be altered without 
altering all the rest. Strike out from it any exist- 
ing evil, and, though you get rid of one objection- 
able ‘ingredient, the world being thereby changed 
in all its parts is no longer the best possible world. 
Strike out from it the life of any villain who did or 
is doing his mischievous work in it, and no longer 
is it the best possible world. As Judas, the ‘son 
of perdition,” was a necessary agent in establishing 
the Christian dispensation, so every malefactor is a 
necessary agent in that system of blessing which, 
according to this philosophy, the existing order is 
supposed to be. 


248 DUALISM AND OPTIMISM. 


Lawrence Valla, a writer of the fifteenth century, 
in a “ Dialogue on the Freedom of the Will and its 
Relation to Divine Prescience,” supposes Sextus 
Tarquinius, of infamous memory, to consult the 
oracle of Apollo, and there to learn his fate, which 
was to be driven an impoverished exile from the 
enraged city. Tarquin complains of such a doom, 
and is advised of the crime by which he would de- 
serve it. ‘‘No,” he replies, “I will do no such 
thing.” ‘ How!” says the god, “do you make me 
to be a liar? I show you the future; I tell you 
that which must come to pass.” “But am I not 
free?” the youth indignantly demands; “is it not 
in my power to obey the dictates of virtue?” 
‘“‘Know, my poor Sextus,” Apollo rejoins, “the 
gods make every one such as he is. Jupiter has 
made the wolf voracious, the hare timid, the ass 
foolish, the lion brave. He has given you a wicked, 
incorrigible soul ; you will act in conformity with 
your nature, and Jupiter will deal with you as your 
actions will deserve. He has sworn it by the 
Styx.” 

Here Valla had left the case of Tarquin, and 
here Leibnitz takes it up. He supplements the 
apologue with a sequel conceived in the spirit of 
his philosophy. Sextus quits Delphos and applies 
to Jupiter at Dodona. “Why have you condemned 
me, O God, to be wicked and to be miserable? 


DUALISM AND OPTIMISM. 249 


Change my lot, and change my heart, or acknowl- 
edge your injustice.” Jupiter tells him that, if he 
will renounce Rome, the Parce shall spin him other 
destinies, —he shall be good and happy. If he 
goes to Rome he is lost. Sextus is unwilling to 
make this sacrifice, and quitting the temple aban- 
dons: himself to his fate. But Theodorus, the 
priest of that temple, humbly entreats Jupiter to 
explain why he has not given Sextus a different 
will. Jupiter refers him to his daughter, Minerva, 
at Athens. Theodorus makes the journey, arrives 
in Athens, and sleeps in the temple of Minerva, 
where he has a dream which conveys to him the 
desired explanation. His vision takes him to the 
Palace of Destinies which contains, as the goddess 
tells him, the representations not only of all that is 
to happen, but of all that is possible. These possi- 
bilities Jupiter surveyed in the beginning, arranged 
as so many possible worlds, and, having selected the 
most desirable, gave it being ; and so made the ac- 
tual world of our experience. 

She then conducts him to an apartment contain- 
ing the plan of one of these possible worlds. There 
he sees a possible Sextus, who, on quitting the 
temple of Jupiter, instead of going to Rome, goes 
to a city between two seas, which might be sup- 
posed to be Corinth; purchases a small garden, in 
digging it finds a treasure of which he makes a 


250 DUALISM AND OPTIMISM. 


good use, lives beloved and respected, and dies at 
an advanced age, mourned by all the city. Theo- 
dorus then passes into another apartment, repre- 
senting a differently planned world and sees again 
a possible Sextus; who, on quitting the temple, 
goes to Thrace, where he marries the daughter of 
the king, and succeeds him on the throne. The 
apartments are arranged in the form of a pyramid; 
and when Theodorus reaches the apartment which 
forms the apex, he is transported with ecstasy at 
the sight of a world-plan which far surpasses all its 
predecessors in splendor and beauty. He is beside 
himself with joy: “J ne se sentoit pas de joie.” 
Then the goddess informs him that the world 
which he beholds, and in which it appears that 
Sextus, rejecting the counsel of Jupiter, goes to 
Rome and commits the crime which causes his 
ruin, —that this world which seems to him so 
beautiful, of all possible worlds the best, is the 
very world in which he lives. 


Optimism is the true solution of the problem of 
evil, a doctrine with which that of Theism must 
stand or fall. If this world is not the best possible 
world, then the God of Theism is not that world’s 
creator: the best possible, not as a present finality, 
but as means and method of the perfect good. 
This is the only Optimism which reason can legit- 


DUALISM AND OPTIMISM. 251 


imate. The time will never come when evil shall 
wholly cease from the earth, when all wrong shall 
be expunged, suffering unknown, and 


“Fear and sin and grief expire, 
Cast out by perfect love.” 


Neither in this world nor in any future world is 
such a state possible. Evil there must always be. 
Old evils may be abolished, but new evils will 
spring. The health of humanity requires the ex- 
istence of evil as incentive to effort and topic 
of action. Progress is better than all perfection. 
Finding is good, but seeking is better, if finding 
is to end with rest in the found. The kingdom of 
heaven must be always coming; but hope would 
expire were it fully come. And the saying remains 
for ever true, that ‘“‘ by hope we are saved.” 


X. 
PANTHEISM. 


ANTHEISM is a name of bad repute in the- 
ology, where it passes for something akin to 
Atheism, and a good deal more dangerous. 

The justice of this reproach depends on the defi- 
nition we give to the term, and on the correctness 
of that definition. The word, though designating 
views and opinions as old as any in philosophy, is 
comparatively modern. The first writer who is 
known to have used it is the English Deist Toland, 
who, near the beginning of the last century, 1705, 
published a work, entitled “Socinianism fairly 
stated; being an Example of Fair Dealing in Theo- 
logical Controversies. To which is prefixed, In- 
difference in Disputes recommended by a Pantheist 
to an Orthodox Friend.” Some years later, in 
1720, he published a treatise, entitled ‘‘ Pantheisti- 
cum, sive Formula Societatis Socratice.” In this 
he defines his Pantheism as follows: “ Vis et Ener- 
gia Totius, Creatrix omnium et Moderatrix, ae ad 
optimum finem semper tendens, est Deus, quem 


PANTHEISM. 253 


Mentem dicas si placet, et Animam Universi: unde 
Sodales Socratici proprio ut dixi vocabulo appellan- 
tur Pantheistz, cum vis illa secundum eos non nisi 
sola ratione ab ipsomet Universo separetur.” ‘The 
Force and Energy of the Whole, the Creator and 
Ruler of all things, always tending to the best end, 
is God, whom, if you please, you may call the 
Mind and Soul of the Universe. Hence the Soda- 
les Socratici are called, as I said, by the appropriate 
term ‘ Pantheists,’ inasmuch as, according to them, 
that force is distinguished by reason alone from the 
Universe itself.” 

God, the creative and ruling power of the uni- 
verse, distinguished by reason alone from the uni- 
verse itself: if this definition be accepted, we have 
in Pantheism a theory distinguished from Theism 
proper by the immanence in Nature of the Supreme 
Power, but not less widely distinguished from Athe- 
ism by the supposition of a Power to which the name 
of God is applied. The appellation of “atheist” 
is then only legitimate when freely assumed, — when 
the existence of God, or the agency of an intelli- 
gent Will in the conduct of the universe, is ex- 
pressly denied. So long as the philosopher professes 
to believe in a God, in whatever sense, and gives 
that name to a Power over all, the belief in God 
must be allowed him, however his conception of 
Deity may differ from yours or mine, however it 


254 PANTHEISM. 


may seem to us to want what is most essential to 
Godhead. It is not misconception of the nature, 
but denial of the fact, of Godhead, that constitutes 
Atheism. 

Toland, so far as we know, was the first to as- 
sume the name of Pantheist, but by no means the 
first to pantheize. Nor does his definition of Panthe- 
ism embrace all the varieties of view which might 
with equal propriety be so designated. The name 
is one of wide application. John Scotus, Giordano 
Bruno, Spinoza, Schelling, are all Pantheists, but 
with very considerable differences in their concep- 
tion of God and the world. Atheism has no more 
sympathy with Pantheism than with Theism. The 
Atheist regards it as a shallow pretence, or a sense- 
less abstraction. To Schopenhauer, the controversy 
between Theist and Pantheist suggests an imagi- 
nary dialogue, which might be supposed to take place 
in a theatre at Milan. One of the speakers imag- 
ines himself to be in the celebrated puppet-theatre 
of Girolamo, and admires the art with which the 
director has fashioned his puppets and guides their 
performance. The other says, “ No! we are in the 
teatro della scala; the director and his associates 
are themselves the actors, and the poet also takes 
part in the play.” ‘My principal objection to 
Pantheism,” says this philosopher, ‘‘is that it 
settles nothing. Calling the world ‘God’ is not 


PANTHEISM. 255 


explaining it: it is only enriching language with a 
superfluous synonyme. Whether you say the world 
is God, or the world is the world, it amounts to the 
same thing. Itis true that, if you start with the 
idea of God as something given, and then say, God 
is the world, that 7s a kind of explanation, although 
a mere verbal one, inasmuch as it refers an un- 
known to something known. But when you start 
with the idea of the world which is actually given, 
a given reality, and then say that the world is God, 
it is clear that nothing is explained thereby. At 
best, it is only a referring of the unknown to some- 
thing still more unknown. . . . It would be much 
more correct to identify the world with the Devil, as 
the venerable author of the ‘ Theologia Germanica’ 
has done. On page 93 of his immortal work (ac- 
cording to the restored text, Stuttgart, 1851), he 
says, ‘ Therefore the evil spirit and Nature are one; 
and, unless Nature is overcome, the evil Enemy 
is not overcome.’ ” 

But Schopenhauer is wrong, whatever the “‘ The- 
ologia Germanica” may teach; wrong, if not wil- 
fully unjust. No Pantheistic philosopher identifies 
God with the phenomenal world. “Jupiter est 
quodcunque vides, quocunque moveris,” is a flight 
of poetic sentiment, not a philosophic statement. 
Even Toland, as we see, distinguishes God from 
the universe by the attribute of reason; and that 
distinction is infinite. 


256 PANTHETISM. 


It is a vulgar impression, which Schopenhauer 
either ignorantly or wilfully indorses, that Pan 
theism is simply identification of God with the 
sensible world. Let us hear what Schelling, the 
greatest of recent Pantheists, says concerning this 
common error. I quote from the “System der 
gesammten Philosophie und der Naturphilosophie 
insbesondere” (p. 177): “ You will say, then, that 
this system is Pantheism. Suppose it were Panthe- 
ism in your sense, what of it? Suppose that this 
system precisely, and no other, were the result of 
reason ; ought I not, in spite of your terror at the 
word, to maintain it as the only true one? The 
most vulgar kind of polemic in philosophy is that 
which is waged by means of certain images of 
terror taken from the history of philosophy, and 
held up to every new system as so many Medusa- 
heads. But what is meant by your Pantheism? 
If I rightly conceive it, it is that the all-ness 
(allheit) of Deity is understood to mean that every 
thing, that is, the sum of sensible objects, is God. 
But this is not at all what we maintain. So far are 
we from saying that the sum of sensible objects is 
God, that, on the contrary, we contend that the 
very reason of their being objects of sense is their 
privation of Deity.” 

Giordano Bruno is unquestionably Pantheist; 
but Bruno distinctly acknowledges God as the 


f 
4 
j 


PANTHEISM. 257 


Author of Nature, which, he maintains, must have 
had a beginning and a cause. He calls Nature the 
mirror in which God is imaged. 

Scotus Erigena, that wondrous intellect, the 
light of the ninth century, is commonly regarded 
as Pantheist ; but the whole strain of the “* De Divi- 
sione Nature” is an emphasizing of the distinction 
between the created and the uncreated. Nature in 
his division is four fold: (1) The Nature which 
creates and is not created; (2) Nature created 
and creating; (3) Nature created, which does not 
create ; and, finally, (4) Nature uncreated and un- 
creating. The first of these — Nature which creates 
and is not created — he afterward identifies with the 
fourth; namely, Nature which is neither created 
nor creates. They are one and the same, viewed 
in different relations, according to the following re- 
markable statement, which I translate as illustrat- 
ing Erigena’s doctrine of the “ Apokatastasis:” 
“When, therefore, we think of the divine Nature 
as the beginning and cause of all things (for itself 
is dvapyov and avaitiov, that is, without beginning 
and without cause; since nothing precedes which 
can have to it the relation of beginning or cause, 
but itself, on the contrary, creates the nature of all 
things whose cause and beginning it is), we not im- 
properly call it Nature creative and uncreated. 


For it creates, and suffers creation from no one. 
17 


258 PANTHEISM. 


But knowing this same divine Nature to be the end 
of all things, beyond which there is nothing, and in 
which all things eternally subsist and are alto- 
gether God, we rightly call it neither created nor 
creative: not created, indeed, because it is created 
by no one; neither creative, because it now ceases 
to create, all things being converted into its own 
eternal reasons (in which they will for ever remain), 
and ceasing to be designated by the appellation of 
‘creature.’ For God will be all in all, and all crea- 
tion will be shadowed into God (obumbrabitur), 
as the stars are hidden in the light of the rising 
sun. Do you not see, therefore, with what reason 
we may call one and the same divine Nature in 
view of a beginning uncreated, but creative, and, 
in view of the end, both uncreated and uncrea- 
tive?” 

Even Spinoza emphasizes causality in God, and 
distinguishes between the infinite and the finite. 
God, he says, is the efficient cause, not only of the 
existence, but of the essence, of things. Eth. 
Part i. Prop. xxv. 

I cite these four most eminent examples of pan- 
theistic philosophy — Erigena, Bruno, Spinoza, and 
Schelling —as proofs that Pantheism does not, as 
Schopenhauer intimates, and as vulgar prejudice 


1 From the edition Monasterii Guestphalorum, 1838, Lib. III. 
p. 248. 


PANTHEISM. 259 


supposes, confuse the distinction between God and 
the sensible world. It is not atheistic, but theistic, 
in its view of the visible creation. It agrees with 
the Theism which condemns it, in its putting of 
the world as secondary, as effect, and God as pri- 
mary, as cause. It agrees with Theism in its con- 
fession of a supermundane God, — supermundane, 
but not extramundane. The popular Theism sup- 
poses a God existing outside of the universe which 
he has made. It supposes a Creator who once in 
time called a universe into being, and has been 
ever since a spectator and director of its ongoings, 
having no substantial connection with it, but only 
a providential and governmental one: providen- 
tially active, but substantially withdrawn ; and not 
only withdrawn, but, as so many of the popular 
hymns represent it, removed to an inconceivable 


distance, — 
“Infinite lengths beyond the bounds 


Where stars revolve their little rounds.” 
The God of Pantheism is immanent, interfused, all- 
permeating, —copresent to all being, the ground 
of all appearance, the life of all life. This is the 
ontology of Pantheism; and, with this conception of 
Deity, the view of many whose Theism is unques- 
tioned coincides. Newton, in his “ Principia,” says, 
‘*¢ Omnipresens est [Deus] non per virtutem solam, 
sed etiam per substantiam.”” Berkeley, whose posi- 


260 PANTHEYISM. 


tion in the Anglican Church would seem to be a 
sufficient guarantee of his orthodoxy, is Pantheist 
in his ontology, though differing widely from Spi- 
noza, — Pantheist in his denial of any other sub- 
stratum of the visible phenomenal world than the 
immediate action of Deity. Pére Malebranche, 
whose orthodoxy as a priest of the Church of Rome 
is equally unquestionable, is also Pantheist in this 
regard. It is but the combination of the two prin- 
ciples of Theism and Idealism. Every Theist who 
is an Idealist, is also a Pantheist to this extent. In 
fact, it is the Christian doctrine of omnipresence as 
affirmed by St. Paul: “In him we live, and move, 
and have our being ;” ‘“‘ One God and Father of all, 
who is above and through all, and in you all.” 
The alternative is Anthropomorphism in theology, 
and Materialism in philosophy. 

But this is only one stage or one form of Panthe- 
ism. That which really and fundamentally distin- 
guishes Pantheism, as represented by Spinoza, from 
Theism as usually understood, is not the doctrine 
of the one substance, but the doctrine of the one 
sole agent, — the denial of any other agency than 
that of the one God, as well in the spiritual as in 
the phenomenal world. In this there is something 
more than what is called in philosophy “deter- 
minism,” or “necessitarianism,”—a doctrine by no 
means peculiar to Pantheism. Spinoza not only 


PANTHEISM. 261 


denies freedom of will to man, but denies to man 
substantial existence, according to the Tenth Propo- 
sition of the Second Part of the Ethic. “Ad es- 
sentiam hominis non pertinet esse substantie, sive 
substantia formam hominis non constituit.” ‘From 
which,” in a corollary, “it follows,” he says, ‘that 
the essence of man consists in certain modifications 
of the attributes of God.” And in a corollary, 
under the Eleventh Proposition of the same Part, 
he infers the human mind to be “‘a part of the in- 
finite intellect of God. So that, when we say the 
human mind perceives this or that, we say nothing 
else than that God, not in his infinity, but as ex- 
plained by the nature of the human mind, or as 
constituting the essence of the human mind, has 
this or that idea.” In other words, as appears more 
fully from what follows, there is in Spinoza’s system 
no such entity as the human mind or soul. What 
we call such is only a thought of God. 

Another characteristic of Pantheism as repre- 
sented by Spinoza, and a point of marked distinc- 
tion between it and Theism, is its non-recognition 
of that attribute of Deity which Theism expresses 
by the term “Lord.” The God of Pantheism is in 
no sense Lord. Having no intelligent subjects, — 
the mind or soul not being in this philosophy a dis- 
tinct entity, but only a mode of the divine thought, 
— the attribute of lordship cannot be ascribed to 


262 PANTHEISM. 


him. But that attribute is among the fundamentals 
of Theism. The two ideas of God and Lord, in the 
view of Theism, are inseparable. Godhead is lord- 
ship. In the words of Newton, — the words with 
which he closes his ‘“ Principia,” — “‘ Deus est vox 
relativa et ad servos refertur. Deitas est domina- 
tio Dei, non in corpus proprium, sed in subditos.” 
It appears, then, that whilst, in its positive as- 
pects, as recognizing the immanence of God in Na- 
ture, and affirming Him to be the real substratum 
and ground of the phenomenal world, Pantheism 
is not irreconcilable with Theism,—%in fact, coin- 
cides with the Theism of theistic Idealists, — the 
negative difference between the two is very wide. 
In its denial, not only of proper agency, but of 
individual being, to man, and its consequent non- 
recognition of lordship in Deity, the Pantheism of 
Spinoza differs as widely from Theism on the one 
side as it does from Atheism on the other. A proof 
of this double discrepance is the curious fact of the 
diametrically opposite judgments of this philosophy 
pronounced by men of distinguished ability, accord- 
ing to their light. Bayle, a confessed and inveter- 
ate sceptic, —a man who acknowledged that his 
talent consisted in raising doubts, but whose sen- 
tence, unfortunately, determined the opinion enter- 
tained of Spinoza for a hundred years, —denounces 
him in very emphatic terms as an Atheist. On the 


PANTHEISM. 963 


contrary, the tender and devout Novalis, in whom 
no trait is more conspicuous than a living and pro- 
found faith, did not hesitate to characterize him as 
“‘God-inebriated,” 1— a man drunk with the idea of 
God. The latter judgment, as it certainly is the 
fairest in its spirit and purpose, so it is also the 
most correct in fact. To designate as Atheist a 
man to whom God was all in all, is wilful absurdity. 
On the other hand, however, it must be confessed 
that a system which knows no being but God, 
ignores what is most distinctive in Godhead as 
conceived by Theism, — personal sovereignty and 
providential rule. For, “a God,” says Newton, 
again, ‘“‘ without dominion, providence, and final 
causes, is nothing else than Fate and Nature.” ? 
This system misses, moreover, what is equally 
essential in Theism, — the attribute of holiness, and 
with it the related idea of a moral government 
exercised by God over rational moral natures. 
Spinoza is the typical exponent of Pantheism. 
His system, given to the world two hundred years 
ago, remains to this day the most thorough and 
complete of all which bear that name. An im- 
mense influence the man has had with a certain 


1 Mr. Froude, in his excellent essay on Spinoza, justly criticises 
this epithet as descriptive of a mystic, not of a logician. 

2 “Deus sine dominio, providentia, et causis finalibus, nihil 
aliud est quam Fatum et Natura.” 


264 PANTHEISM. 


class of minds; not conspicuous, but penetrating 
and profound, —an influence not in the way of 
commanding assent to his views, or of founding 
a school (his following in this sense has been 
small), but in that of giving direction and tone 
to philosophy, —an influence affecting the senti- 
ments rather than the reason; but, through the 
sentiments of minds in communion with his own, 
acting indirectly on the feelings and the faith of 
many to whom his system is unknown, and modi- 
fying the poetry, art, and religion of the time. 
Gothe confesses the power of this influence as he 
experienced it in early manhood. “TI had received 
into myself, ” he says, “the being and the way of 
thinking of an extraordinary man, — imperfectly, 
indeed, and as it were surreptitiously; but I was 
already experiencing therefrom the most mo- 
mentous effects. This mind, which wrought so 
decidedly upon me, and which was to have so 
great an influence on my whole way of thinking, 
was Spinoza. After looking about in the world, to 
no purpose, for some means of fashioning my strange 
nature, I chanced at last on this man’s ‘ Ethica.’ 
Of what I may have read for myself out of that 
work, or of what I may have read into it, I can 
give no account. Enough: I found there a sedative 
to my passions. A large and free view of the sen- 
sible and moral world seemed to open itself before 


PANTHEISM. - 265 


me. But what specially chained me to him was 
the boundless disinterestedness which shone forth 
from every proposition. That wondrous word, 
‘Who rightly loves God must not demand that God 
should love him in return,’ with all the premises 
on which it rests, and all the conclusions that 
flow from it, entirely filled my thought. To be 
disinterested in all, and most disinterested in love 
and friendship, was my highest joy, my maxim, my 
practice; and so, that later petulant saying of 
mine, ‘If I love thee, what is that to thee?’ was 
spoken from my very heart. . . . The all-compos- 
ing quietism of Spinoza contrasted my up-stirring 
endeavor; his mathematical method was the op- 
posite of my poetical way of looking at and de- 
scribing objects ; and precisely that ruled mode of 
treatment, which was thought not suitable to moral 
subjects, made me his passionate disciple, his most 
ardent adorer.” 

Schleiermacher, in his “‘ Discourses on Religion,” 
renders this enthusiastic tribute: “Sacrifice rev- 
erently with me to the Manes of the holy outcast, 
Spinoza. Him penetrated the sublime world-spirit. 
The infinite was his beginning and his end; the 
universe, his only and eternal love. In holy inno- 
cence and deep humility, he mirrored himself in the 
eternal world. Full of religion he was, and full of 
a holy spirit; and therefore he stands alone and 


266 PANTHEISM. 


unapproached, — master in his art, but exalted 
above the profane guild; without disciples and 
without citizenship.” 


And who, on a nearer view, is the man whom 
two such witnesses, — Germany’s greatest poet and 
greatest theologian, — not to speak of inferior spir- 
its, concur in exalting? A Jew by race, by nearer 
ancestry a Portuguese, or, according to Auerbach, 
a Spaniard, with a mixture, on the mother’s side, 
of Moorish blood, by nativity a Dutchman, — Ba- 
ruch, afterward Benedict, son of Benjamin Spi- 
noza, or Espinoza, was born in Amsterdam (where 
his father, with other Spanish and Portuguese mer- 
chants, had found refuge from Peninsular persecu- 
tion of the Jews), on the 24th November, 1632. 
The boy received the best instruction which Jew- 
ish discipline — nowhere more thorough than in 
Amsterdam —could supply, and developed an early 
and marked proclivity to intellectual pursuits. 
Having mastered the Rabbinical lore of his day, 
well-grounded in the Law and the Talmud, and 
even, it is said, a proficient in the Kabbala, he car- 
ried his thirst for knowledge and his extraordinary 
power of acquisition into Gentile fields. He studied 
Latin under tutelage of the somewhat notorious 
Van den Ende, who was afterward put to death 
at Paris for complicity in the Rohan conspiracy. 


PANTHEISM. 267 


With the aid of Latin, the sole language of science 
in that day, which he learned to write with great 
purity, he applied himself to Christian authors ; 
studied theology and studied physics; made him- 
self acquainted with the writings of Descartes, then 
supreme in philosophy, and through him was initi- 
ated in the world of ideal speculation. In the 
strength of this meat, he outgrew Judaism, or at 
least the traditional, ceremonial Judaism of the 
“Dispersion.” But such a witness of the ancestral 
faith was not to be surrendered without a strug- 
gle by the Rabbins. They remonstrated with him, 
they flattered him, and finally resorted to bribes. 
An annual stipend of a thousand florins, according 
to Colerus, was offered him, if he would not alto- 
gether desert the synagogue. He spurned the lure, 
and went his way. 

Finally, in 1657,! in the twenty-fifth year of his 
age, he was excommunicated, with the triple and 
extreme ban of Hebrew execration, devoting him 
to all imaginable ills; invoking the wrath of Jeho- 
vah and the curses of all good angels to light upon 
him and all his posterity; forbidding all men to 
have communication with him, or to show him 
mercy. An attempt was made to arraign him 
before the civil tribunal on the charge of blas- 
phemy, but without success. Christian Dutchmen 





1 According to Auerbach’s “ Spinoza, Ein Denkerleben,” p. 362. 


268 PANTHEISM. 


would not lend themselves to the murderous spite 
of Portuguese Jews. His life was imperilled by 
the hatred of these zealots. Waylaid by night in 
a lonely street, the assassin’s dagger pierced his 
coat, but missed his heart. He preserved the per- 
forated garment by way of memorial. 

Meanwhile his father had died; leaving him not 
without means, had he chosen to avail himself of 
them. This he declined doing. He made over his 
share of the paternal estate to his sisters, Miriam 
and Rebecca, reserving for himself only a bed (“si 
unicum lectum excipias”). Thanks to his Jewish 
training, and that wise provision of the Talmud 
which Christian laws and Christian systems of 
education would do well to imitate, —the pro- 
vision which ordains that every youth, whether 
rich or poor, while receiving instruction in letters 
and science, shall also learn some manual art, — 
he had one resource. Any thing rather than de- 
pendence. He had learned to polish lenses; he 
would live by his craft. With this brave resolve, 
he hired a small attic, took thither his tools and 
his bed, and lived a true philosophic life, dividing 
his time between mechanical and intellectual toil. 
The profits of his craft were moderate; but his 
wants were equally so. A few stivers supplied 
the daily rations of a man who subsisted mainly 
on thought. 


PANTHEISM. 269 


The machinations of his enemies, who still plotted 
against him, obliged him to quit Amsterdam. He 
removed his residence, first, to Auwerkerke ; then 
to Rhynsburg, near Leiden; thence to Voorburg ; 
and finally settled in the Hague, beneath the roof 
of his friend, Henry Van der Spyck, —a painter of 
note, of whom Spinoza learned the rules of that 
art, which he practised with some success. 

Friends were not wanting of the highest rank 
and commanding influence, who were ready to pat- 
ronize the martyr-scholar. Among them, Olden- 
burg, German ambassador to England, first under 
Cromwell, then under Charles II.; also, the great 
Condé; and that noble republican, John de Witt, 
grand pensioner of the States-General, who after- 
ward fell a victim to the fury of the Orange party, 
and was murdered by a mob in 1672. Karl Lud- 
wig, the elector palatine, offered him a chair in the 
University of Heidelberg, ‘“‘ Cum amplissima philo- 
sophandi libertate ;”’ but he declined the position, 
preferring independence to the favor of princes. 
The wealthy Simon van Vries, one of his more 
intimate associates, sent him a donation of two 
thousand florins, which he returned ; having no oc- 
casion, he said, for such subsidy, and fearing the 
disturbing influence of riches. That devoted friend 
would have made him his heir; but Spinoza en- 
treated him not to pass by his own brother, to 


270 PANTHEISM. 


whom the inheritance of right belonged. The will 
was altered accordingly, but with the proviso that 
an annual pension should be paid to the philoso- 
pher out of the estate. The brother would have 
made it five hundred florins ; Spinoza would accept 
three hundred, and no more. 

Brief space was allowed him for the usufruct of 
this legacy. A pulmonary weakness, with which 
he had suffered from his twentieth year, though 
it could not restrain his indefatigable industry, 
abridged with a premature close his works and 
days. He died of phthisis, at the age of forty- 
four, on the 21st of February, 1677. 

No philosopher has left a purer record; no 
scholar ever lived a more blameless life. All that 
is known of him, and especially the devotion of 
such friends, declares him one of the truest and 
bravest of the sons of men. 

Of his works, beside the ‘‘ Letters,” and the 
‘Exposition of the Philosophy of Descartes,” there 
are four of pre-eminent importance, — the “ Trac- 
tatus de Emendatione Intellectus,” the “ Tractatus 
Politici,” the “ Tractatus Theologico-politicus,” and 
the “ Ethica.” The two last named have originated 
epochs in the history of human thought. 

The “ Tractatus Theologico-politicus ” gave the 
impulse and direction to modern Biblical criticism ; 
it presented or suggested views which German 


PANTHEISM. Dik 


theologians have subsequently elaborated, applied, 
and set before the world, in the critical and exe- 
getical results of their inquiries. 

The “ Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata,” 
the most influential of all Spinoza’s writings, is a 
postumous publication, and contains his philoso- 
phy proper, —those pantheistic ideas which, dur- 
ing the past century, have wrought with such 
marked effect on speculative minds. It is greatly 
to be regretted that the author chose for this work 
a form so forbidding in itself, and so ill-adapted to 
his theme. The method of geometry is applicable 
only to sensible objects, or topics that le within 
the scope of exact science. When applied to top- 
ics of pure speculation, — to things which do not 
admit of exact demonstration, which are merely, 
and must always be, matters of opinion, — it chal- 
lenges the counter-application of tests which spec- 
ulative philosophy can never satisfy. Spinoza’s 
system, judged by the test which he himself pro- 

vokes, — considered as mathematical, or even as 
- logical, demonstration of the views it propounds, — 
is a failure. Many of the fundamental positions, 
announced with such parade of mathematical cer- 
tainty, are easily refuted, and have been refuted 
by critical analysis. Its primary and obvious error 
is the confusing of his own arbitrary positing of 
the one Substance (which is God) with the im- 


272 PANTHEISM. 


agined self-evident proof of that Substance. In 
his third definition, he defines substance to be 
‘“‘that which is in itself, and is conceived by itself; 
that is, whose conception does not need the con- 
ception of any other thing by help of which it is 
found.” And this definition he seems to regard as 
equivalent to a proof of the reality of that Sub- 
stance. He proceeds to speak of it as a reality, and 
all at once, in the Seventh Proposition, affirms that 
“it belongs to the nature of Substance to exist.” 
His demonstration of that proposition is, that Sub- 
stance cannot be produced by another (accord- 
ing to the corollary of an antecedent proposition), 
and therefore must be the cause of itself, which (ac- 
cording to Definition First) means that its essence 
involves existence. This is all the evidence we 
have of the fact of the one Substance, on which 
Spinoza’s whole system rests. 

A remarkable instance of confusion of thought 
occurs in the Scholium to the Eleventh Proposi- 
tion, which affirms the necessary existence of God. 
“Since the possibility of existence is a power 
(‘quum posse existere potentia sit’), it follows that 
the more of reality belongs to the nature of any 
thing, the more of power it has from itself to exist ; 
and that, therefore, the absolutely infinite Being, or 
God, has from himself an absolutely infinite power 
of existing, and must, therefore, absolutely exist.” 


— 


PANTHEISM. 2738 


He does not see that the possibility of existence, 
of which he speaks, is in himself, the subject, not 
in the object. It is simply his perception of the 
possibility that such a Being exists. Possibility is 
not a thing, but a thought,—the judgment of a 
thinking subject. It exists only as contemplated. — 
If, therefore, the possibility of existence is referred 
to the Being in question, it must be a thought of 
that Being; and, to have that thought, he must al- 
ready exist. Imagine a being contemplating the 
possibility of his own existence! 

But the refutation of Spinoza’s Propositions con- 
cerns only or mostly the form and demonstration of 
his philosophy: it does not essentially affect the 
underlying ideas, the grand intuitions, which make 
the essence of his system. These are true, and of 
infinite moment. Al] that is positive in his philos- 
ophy Theism may accept. What is wanting in it 
—the recognition of individual, self-determining 
spirits, and, correlate with them, of the proper lord- 
ship or moral government of God — Theism must 
supply. 

Spinoza supposes a single and sole Substance com- 
prising all that is, and of which all phenomena and 
all finite existences are modes and affections. Of 
this substance, all the known attributes are compre- 
hended in the two determinations,— thought and 
extension. And this Substance is God. I give his 

18 


274 PANTHEISM. 


own words: ‘ Besides God, there can be no sub- 
stance given or conceived.”! “ Whatsoever is, is in 
God; and, without God, nothing can be or be con- 
ceived.”? “God is a thinking thing.”® “God is 
an extended thing.”* These are the extreme and 
most characteristic positions of his ontology. The 
last, the most characteristic of all, will seem to 
most Theists to be also the most questionable. But 
here, too, the question respects rather the form than 
the substance. What Spinoza really means is, that 
God is the cause of all extension. So, at least, 
I interpret him. The error—whether Spinoza’s 
error or the reader’s misunderstanding of his intent 
— the error lies in conceiving extension as passive, 
instead of active; as a state, instead of an act. 
Newton, as we have seen, says substantially the 
same thing. 

It is clear that, if this Substance exists, it must 
exist necessarily. Spinoza does not prove its exist- 
ence; but he felt this necessity, and points to it in 
his First Definition, —the opening sentence of the 
‘“‘Ethica:” “By self-cause, I understand that whose 
essence involves its existence.” The phrase “self- 


1 “Preter Deum, nulla dari neque concipi potest substantia.” 
Pars i. Prop. xiv. 

2 “ Quicquid est in Deo est, et nihil sine Deo esse neque concipi 
potest.” Ib. Prop. xv. 

3 “Deus est res cogitans.” Pars ii. Prop. i. 

* “ Deus est res extensa.” Ib. Prop. ii. 


PANTHEISM. 275 


cause” is unfortunate, inasmuch as causality ex- 
presses a relation between an antecedent and a 
consequent, and cannot with propriety be predi- 
cated of that which had no beginning, and is out of 
the category of time. But Spinoza meant to indi- 
cate the fact of self-existence, which lies at the foun- 
dation of all philosophy. Self-existent is that which 
not only is uncaused, if existent, but which must 
exist, if any thing exists; which must exist in order 
that the idea of existence may be present to my 
thought; of whose existence, therefore, my idea is 
a proof. It is that which cannot be conceived as 
non-existent. Any particular thing may, with an 
effort of abstraction be conceived as non-existent, 
—a tree, a book, a planet, a solar system. But 
can you conceive of nothing existing, — of nothing 
having ever existed? Make the attempt! Take 
some quiet moment, and try to imagine—nothing. 
What will be the result? You will find yourself 
imagining two things,—space, and a thinking sub- 
ject. You cannot get rid of these two. You have 
blown away the universe with your thought; but 
the thought remains. You cannot imagine it not to 
be. There is in your imagination some one who takes 
cognizance of the void,—a thinking subject. In 
other words, there is thought, — the first attribute 
of Spinoza’s God. And there is the void, that is, 
space, which gives the idea of extension, — the second 


276 PANTHEISM. 


attribute of Spinoza’s God. Space itself is not exten- 
sion: it is only the perceived possibility of extended 
existence ; it is the first moment in the self-objecti- 
vation of the thinking subject. There is as yet no 
actual, but there is an ideal, extension of the self- 
existent. Since, therefore, in the absence of all 
other existence, a thinking subject and space are 
necessary conceptions, we have Spinoza’s Substance, 
with its two attributes, — thought and extension. 

A full exposition of the “Ethica” is not within 
the scope of this essay. A selection of some of its 
most characteristic positions may suffice to repre- 
sent its spirit and purport. 


“In the nature of things, there is given nothing 
contingent, but all things are determined from the 
necessity of the Divine Nature to a certain mode of 
existence and operation.” Part i. Prop. xxix. 

“The will cannot be termed a free, but only a 
necessary, cause.” Prop. xxxii. 

“Things could not have been produced by God 
in any other mode and order than that in which 
they have been produced.” Prop. xxxiii. 

“The power of God is his very essence.” Prop. 
XXXiv. 

“To those who ask why God did not create men 
in such a way that they should be governed by 
reason alone, I answer, Because there was in him 


PANTHEISM. BTT 


no lack of material for creating all things from the 
highest to the lowest grade of perfection. Or, more 
properly speaking, Because the laws of his nature 
were so ample that they sufficed to the production 
of all that could be conceived by an infinite intel- 
lect.” Appendix. 

“The ideas of the attributes of God, as of single 
things, have not for their efficient cause the things 
idea’d, or the things perceived, but God himself so 
far as he is a thinking thing.” Part ii. Prop. v. 

“ The order and connection of ideas is the same 
as the order and connection of things.” Prop. vii. 

“« He who has a true idea, knows at the same time 
that he has a true idea, and cannot doubt of the 
truth of the thing.” Prop. xlii. 

“Our mind does certain things, and suffers cer- 
tain things. Namely, so far as it has adequate 
ideas, it does necessarily certain things; and, so far 
as it has inadequate ideas, it necessarily suffers cer- 
tain things.” Part iii. Prop. i. 

‘The mind cannot determine the body to think, 
nor the mind the body to move nor to rest, or to any 
thing else.” Prop.ii. (The demonstration is that all 
thought, action, and rest are from God, according to 
his two attributes of thought and extension. The 
mind can only be determined by him as res cogitans, 
the body as res eatensa ; that is, like by like.) 

“ Experience as well as reason teaches that men 


9? 


9 


278 PANTHEISM. 


believe they are free, only because they are con- 
scious of their actions, and ignorant of the causes 
by which they are determined.”  Scholium ad 
Prop. i. 

‘‘ Acts arise solely from adequate ideas ; but pas- 
sions depend solely on inadequate ideas.” Prop. iii. 

‘* Joy is the transition of man from a lesser to a 
greater perfection. Sadness is the transition of 
man from a greater to a lesser perfection.” Affec- 
tuum Definitiones, ii. and iii. 

‘‘We know nothing, certainly, to be good or bad, 
except that which conduces to a true understand- 
ing, or that which hinders a true understanding.” 
Part iv. Prop. xxvii. 

“ The highest good of the mind is the cognition 
of God, and the supreme virtue of the mind is to 
know God.” Prop. xxvii. 

‘‘Nothing can be bad for us through that which 
it has in common with us; but, so far as it is bad for 
us, it is contrary to us.” Prop. xxx. 

“The good which any one who follows virtue 
desires for himself, he desires also for the rest of 
mankind; and that the more, the greater his knowl- 
edge of God.” Prop. xxxvii. 

** He who lives by the guidance of reason en- 
deavors so far as possible to compensate the hatred, 
anger, and contempt of others toward him, with 
‘ove or generosity on his part.” Part iv. Prop. xlvi. 


PANTHEISM. 279 


“Commiseration in him who lives by the 
guidance of reason is in itself bad and useless.” 
Prop. 1. 

“Humility is not a virtue, or does not spring 
from reason.” Prop. hii. 

‘“« Repentance is not a virtue, or does not spring 
from reason ; but he who repents of his act is twice 
miserable, or twice impotent.” Prop. liv. 

“The greatest pride and the greatest abjectness 
are the greatest self-ignorance.” Prop. lv. 

“The greatest pride and the greatest abject- 
ness indicate the greatest weakness of mind.” 
Prop. lvi. 

“The cognition of evil is an inadequate cog- 
nition.” Prop. lxiv. 

“ Whence it follows that, if the mind had only 
adequate ideas, it would form no notion of evil.” 
Coroll. 

“The free man thinks of nothing less than of 
death: his wisdom consists not in the meditation 
of death, but of life.” Prop. Ixvii. 

‘“« Tf men were born free, they would form no con- 
ception of good or evil so long as they remained 
free.” Prop. xviii. 

“Only free men are mutually most agreeable the 
one to the other.” Prop. lxxi. 

“The man who is led by reason is freer in the 
State, where he lives according to the common 


280 PANTHEISM. 


decree, than in solitude, where he obeys his own 
will alone.” Prop. lxxiii. 

“Tt is of the first utility in life to perfect as much 
as possible the intellect or reason. In this one 
thing consists man’s highest felicity or beatitude, 
since beatitude is nothing else than that acqui- 
escence of the mind which springs from the intui- 
tive knowledge of God. But to perfect the intellect 
is nothing else than to understand God, and those 
attributes and acts of God which flow from the 
necessity of his nature. Wherefore, the chief end 
of man, the supreme desire by which he endeavors 
to regulate all others, is that by which he is led to 
an adequate conception of himself and of all that 
can come within the range of his intelligence.” 
Appendix to Part iv. Cap. iv. 

‘*‘ Minds are not conquered by arms, but by love 
and generosity.” Ib. Cap. xi. 

‘¢ An affection which is passion ceases to be pas- 
sion the moment we form a clear and distinct idea 
of it.” Part v. Prop. iii. 

“‘ He who clearly and distinctly understands him- 
self and his own affections, loves God; and the 
more, the more perfectly he understands them.” 
Prop. xv. 

“*No one can hate God.” Prop. xviii. 

‘‘He who loves God cannot endeavor that God 
should love him in return.” Prop. xix. 


PANTHEISM. 281 


“The mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with 
the body; but something remains of it which is 
eternal.” Prop. xxiii. 

“The more we understand single things, the 
more we understand God.” Prop. xxiv. 

**God loves himself with an intellectual love 
which is infinite.” Prop. xxxv. 

‘“‘ The intellectual love of the mind toward God 
is a part of that infinite love with which God loves 
himself.” Prop. xxxvi. 

“From this we clearly understand in what our 
salvation, or blessedness, or liberty consists ; 
namely, in constant and eternal love toward God, 
or in the love of God toward men.” Schol. 

“*He whose body has the greatest number of 
aptitudes has most of that which is eternal in his 
mind.” Prop. xxxix. 

‘** The more any thing possesses of perfection, the 
more it acts and the less it suffers; and, on the other 
hand, the more active it is, the more perfect it is.” 
Prop. xl. 

“Not beatitude but virtue itself is the reward of 
virtue; we rejoice in it not because we restrain our 
lusts, but on the contrary, we are able to restrain 
our lusts because we rejoice in it.” Prop. xlii. 


The result of Spinoza’s influence —an influence 
not to be measured by the number of his readers, 


982 PANTHEISM. 


which must always be small, but by the fructifica- 
tion of his idea in philosophy, religion, art, and gen- 
erally in the thoughts and feelings of the thinking 
and cultured minds of our time,—the result of 
that influence may be summed up as emancipation 
from the Dualism and the Anthropomorphism of the 
old popular faith. Spinoza turned the Devil out of 
the universe, and has given us a God who is not an 
individual secluded and remote,—a regent en- 
throned above the skies, — but an all-present re- 
ality. In his attempt to establish this beneficent 
verity, he sacrifices, as we have seen, — and that is 
the vice of his system,—the proper personality of 
God. But this very extreme has contributed more 
effectually, perhaps, than a more theistic view 
would have done, to correct the opposite error. 
And this false extreme is not essential, I think, 
to the central and constitutive principle of the 
“Ethica.” Unity of substance is not incompatible 
with the creation, by self-limitation, of individual ex- 
istences having separate consciousnesses, and there- 
fore distinct persons; whereby the personality of 
God is maintained in the one essential article of a 
conscious and moral relation to others. 

The weakness of Spinozism, of Pantheism as ex- 
pounded by him, consists in the relaxation of the 
moral sense, — the moral indifferentism resulting 
from a system which not only refers all action, good 


PANTHEISM. 283 


or evil, directly to God as the one immediate and 
only actor in all, but virtually denies all distinction 
between good and evil, by resolving, as we have 
seen, the notion of any such distinction into inade- 
quate cognition. 

Its strength is the quickened sense which, by its 
emancipation from Dualism and Anthropomorph- 
ism, it gives us of the all-pervading and immediate 
presence of God. The divine Omnipresence, once 
a cold, unmeaning dogma, it has made a fact of 
consciousness. This effect—to mention but one 
manifestation of it—is realized in the altered view 
and new enjoyment of Nature so conspicuously 
characteristic of the modern mind, and of which, 
among English poets, Wordsworth is the truest ex- 
ponent. If Spinozism impairs the moral sublimity 
of the idea, it deepens our consciousness of the 
being of God. And the more profound our con 
sciousness of God and the sense of his all-presence, 
the more intense our enjoyment of Nature. ‘This 
explains the remarkable fact, that the love of Na- 
ture, in our sense of the term,—that joy in wild, 
sequestered nooks, that delight in the contempla- 
tion of mountain-slopes and the valleys they em- 
bosom, that ‘pleasure in the pathless woods,” that 
‘rapture on the lonely shore,” —is wholly a modern 
sentiment. The ancients—at least, the Greeks and 
Romans — have recorded nothing, and probably ex- 


284 PANTHEISM. 


perienced nothing, of the kind. They painted no 
landscapes, or none like ours with a background 
suggestive of mystery within and beyond. Moun- 
tains to them were merely an obstruction to their 
marches, a problem for the military engineer. 
Some of their writers must have seen the robe of 
glory which the setting sun flings over the shoul- 
ders of Mont Blanc; the charms of Como and Mag- 
giore and the Rhine must have been familiar to their 
eyes: but of all this no word in their works, no 
sign that the meaning and beauty of the landscape 
had melted into their thought. It needs the sense 
of the one-pervading Presence to inspire that feel- 
ing in the soul. It is this that draws us to the 
heart of Nature, and presses the aspects of Nature 
on our hearts. 

Pantheism and Theism are not contradictory, but 
complementary, the one of the other. Theism 
gives us the holy Person, the Providential care, 
the moral rule; Pantheism gives us the diffused 
Presence, the all-pervading Life, the Divine near- 
ness in the outspread landscape. To Pantheism 
belongs the world of Nature; to Theism, the world 
of spirits. 


XI. 
THE TWO RELIGIONS. 


ITHIN the compass of the Christian name — 
professing one origin, claiming one sanction 
—are two religions, which differ as widely, the one 
from the other, in principle and spirit, as Judaism 
differs from Christianity. The Pauline epithets, 
“carnal” and “spiritual,” used to express the lat- 
ter difference, are equally expressive of the former. 
But, as these are terms of blame and praise, I adopt 
in their stead the less offensive and equally signifi- 
cant phrases, legal and liberal. Judaism is repre- 
sented in the New Testament as a religion of law. 
The ritual law, or law as a system, was repudiated 
by Christianity ; but law as a religious principle 
survived the overthrow of the Jewish polity. It 
went over into the new dispensation ; it reappears 
in Christian history, side by side with the principle 
of grace. And so we have a dual Christianity, — 
a legal and a liberal gospel,—the rigid and the 
fluid of Christian faith. 
There are other classifications and other antith- 


286 THE TWO RELIGIONS. 


eses in religion, — ecclesiastical and personal, sen- 
timental and dogmatic, sacramental and spiritual, 
—but none so comprehensive as this of legal and 
liberal, the religion of law and the religion of grace. 
There is none which bisects with so trenchant a 
stroke the Christian world. 


Grace is a specialty of the Christian dispensa- 
tion. This specialty legal Christianity exeludes ; 
and yet, by a curious perversion of speech, the 
‘* Orthodox ” sects have been more free in the use 
of the word “ grace” than liberal Christians. It is 
one of the technicalities of their phraseology, while 
the absence of the thing which that term denotes 
—the free forgiveness of sin to the penitent — is 
precisely the distinguishing trait in their systems. 
No two ideas can be more fundamentally opposite 
than that of grace is to the satisfaction of justice 
by suffering ; and nothing in the history of sects is 
more extraordinary than the misapplication of the 
word * grace”’ to a system of theology which virtu- 
ally repudiates the thing. In the judgment of liberal 
Christians, those systems which treat the death of 
Christ as a satisfaction of Divine justice, — whether 
in the sacrificial sense of expiation, or the more 
questionable “ governmental” sense of a shift or 
compromise, — rule out of Christianity that which 
constitutes its distinctive feature, grace; and place 


THE TWO RELIGIONS. 287 


it on a level with the old religions, in which law 
and sacrifice are the prominent elements. In these 
systems, the Christian’s God, like the God of the 
Jews and the gods of the Gentiles, is a being to be 
propitiated by sacrifice ; with this remarkable dif- 
ference, that, while the Gentile and Jewish divini- 
ties, alienated from individuals and tribes by actual 
personal transgressions, and visiting ancestral crimes 
on the third and fourth generation, could be con- 
ciliated by the blood of bulls or rams, the Chris- 
tian’s God, averse from the whole human race by 
reason of aboriginal sin, can be placated only by 
the blood of a man. Liberal Christianity sees in 
this view a God less gracious than Hebrew Jeho- 
vah or Olympian Jove; and, instead of a dispensa- 
tion of grace, the yoke of a new and sterner law. 
The distinction of legal and liberal respects the 
philosophy of religion, rather than sectarian symbol 
or dogma. Every system of theology and every 
religious creed presupposes antecedent speculation, 
—some philosophic idea, some underlying theory 
of God and man, which, consciously or uncon- 
sciously, shapes the formula, and determines the 
doctrine. When we study the Homousian contro- 
versy of the fourth century, or the Monothelitic of 
the seventh, we see how each party starts from 
premises back of the point in dispute, and back of 
Chaistianity itself. Arius was a thinker of entirely 


288 THE TWO RELIGIONS. 


different build from Athanasius, and would proba- 
bly have dissented from him as emphatically, on 
every other subject involving a philosophical prin- 
ciple, as he did in his christology. Augustine dif 
fered as widely from Pelagius, and Maximus from — 
Theodore. The Ebionitism which prevailed in the 
early Church was the natural product of the strong 
monarchian ! proclivity of the Jewish mind. The 
Christo-theism which ultimately triumphed was 
nursed and matured, if it did not originate, in the 
bosom of Alexandrian speculation. And when we 
come to the mighty spirits of the twelfth and thir- 
teenth centuries, —to Abelard and Anselm, and 
Hugo a St. Victoire ; to Abbot Joachim and Ray- 
mond J.ull and Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon, 
— we see them impelled to review the old dogmas 
in the new light of the great revival of the human 
mind, which began with the Crusades ; we see how 
the reawakened intellect held creed and symbol in 
solution, and how theologians were obliged to re- 
consider and to seek a philosophic basis for the 
placita of the Church. 

The ‘“‘ simple souls,” who, according to Tertul- 
lian, compose, in every age, the great majority of 
believers,? experience no such necessity: they 





1 The monarchian heresies, properly so called, were of later 
date, and of Gentile growth; but the origin of one of them was 
unquestionably Jewish. 

2 «“ Simplices quique, ne dixerim imprudentes et idiote, que 
major semper credentium pars est.” 


THE TWO RELIGIONS. 289 


swallow the symbol that is set before them, asking 
no questions for conscience’ sake; they neither 
know nor care to know in what subsoil of philo- 
sophie speculation their dogma has its root; they 
suppose it delivered bodily by revelation from 
heaven. But revelation never dogmatizes: all 
dogma is grounded in antecedent philosophy. 
Every system of theology is the fruit of philo- 
sophic ideas applied to the facts of revelation. The 
two systems we are now considering presuppose 
very different classes of ideas as their antecedents 
and basis. Their oppugnance is quite as much a 
philosophical as a theological one. It respects the 
fundamental ideas which form the basis of all theol- 
ogy, and is best understood by comparing the views 
of God and spiritual topics proper to each kind. 

In the view of the legalist, God is arbitrary 
power, —a despot whose will makes right. In the 
view of the liberal, God is moral ideal, power in 
which right precedes will,—a love which causes | 
all things to work together for the good of all. 

In the view of the legalist, man is naturally bad; 
sin his normal state. Depraved by an accident of 
history, he is incapable of good, except by a radical 
change in his nature. In the view of the liberal, 
man is naturally imperfect, liable to sin, but also 
capable of good. Sin is an abnormal action of his 


nature ; rectitude, his normal state. 
19 


290 THE TWO RELIGIONS. 


In the view of the legalist, revelation is a com- 
munication made by God to man from without; 
Christ is God in a human form. In the view of the 
liberal, revelation is the perfection of reason, —- 
an intuition of the deeper soul,—God speaking 
from within ; Christ is man in the likeness of God. 

In the view of the legalist, salvation is escape 
from the punishment of sin; the death of Christ, 
placating the divine wrath, is a motive with God, 
inducing him to remit that punishment. In the 
view of the liberal, salvation is deliverance from 
the power of sin; and the life of Christ, consum- 
mated by his death, an aid to moral emancipation. 

In the view of the legalist, Heaven is the local 
residence of the Lord and his redeemed, from which 
the vast majority of human souls are for ever ex- © 
cluded ; Hell is the local and eternal abode of the 
remainder of the race. In the view of the liberal, 
Heaven is the method of moral ascension, also the » 
totality of ascending spirits ; Hell is moral declen- 
* sion, also the totality of descending spirits. 


From this exposition, it appears of what opposite 
elements the two religions are composed, and how 
radical and irreconcilable the antagonism between 
them; how vain the attempt to symbolize these 
sharp antitheses, to atone the intellectual schism, 
or by any theological compromise to harmonize 


THE TWO RELIGIONS. 291 


legal and liberal views in one dogmatic confession. 
The confession that shall reconcile this difference, 
and unite the sects it has sundered, must not be a 
dogmatic but a liturgical one. Such a confession 
and such a union I believe to be not impossible. 
What Christian heart does not rejoice in the 
thought? But every movement in this direction, 
every attempt to cecumenize Protestant Christen- 
dom in one association for liturgical or practical 
purposes, must start with a frank recognition, 
on both sides, of the logically and theologically 
unatonable discrepance between legal and liberal 
theories of religion, frank toleration of that discre- 
pance, and such a yearning for practical atonement 
and reconciliation in Christ as shall place above all 
dogmatic interests and disputes the common Mas- 
ter and Lord, and that union of all men in him for 
which he prayed, “* That they all may be one, as thou, 
Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may 
be one in us.” Let no one think to forward that 
union by compromising doctrinal issues, by dog- 
niatic adjustments, by attempts to symbolize theo- 
logically with other sects. All such attempts are 
like temporary bridges of ice, which connect in 
cold seasons two hostile shores, —hard and un- 
genial while they last, and soon dissolved. When, 
in times of suspended interest and theological tor- 
por, sects unite by the crystallization of their dif- 


292 THE TWO RELIGIONS. 


ferences, — when the very coldness between them 
becomes their bond,— it is easy to foresee the speedy 
dissolution of that bond in the new glow of return- 
ing interest, and the more direct light of the sun. 
There is one word which should never be heard in 
theology, — “‘ compromise.” 

But under whatever organizations, whether ec- 
clesiastically joined or disjunct, there will always 
be, as I believe, these two religions in the world. 
They are too abhorrent in their ground elements, 
too discrete in the last analysis, to be ever com- 
pletely merged in one. They are exponents each 
of a quite distinct and peculiar order of mind; 
each expresses an indestructible spiritual type. 

Legal and liberal! How many peculiarities, the- 
oretic and dogmatic, — how many antagonist doc- 
trines and creeds, theological formulas, sectarian 
issues, ecclesiastical disputes, — arrange and define 
themselves under these two heads! Christianity, 
whose strong, victorious current broke down so 
many barriers, and swept away so many distinc- 
tions, and floated and confounded, and ‘finally 
swallowed, so many philosophies and faiths, — 
Christianity, the most powerful of intellectual and 
historic solvents, did not quite solve this obdurate 
dualism. It married these contrary elements, but 
did not fuse them. The Church was yet in its 
second decade when it fairly polarized into legal 


THE TWO RELIGIONS. 293 


and liberal. The two types were visibly discrim- 
inated, formally organized, and locally and theo- 
retically and practically divided. Jerusalem, the 
natural and ancestral home of legal religion, main- 
tained that aspect of the gospel, as administered 
by the twelve apostles, with James the Just at 
their head. On the other hand, Antioch, capital of 
Syria, “the eldest daughter of Zion,” birth-place of 
the Christian name, birth-place of Christianity itself 
as a world religion, dispensed through Paul, or, in 
his absence, through Hellenizing elders, the liberal 
faith. 

The head and protoplast of liberal Christianity 
is Paul. But here I am bound to remark, that the 
classification given above of the doctrinal aspects 
of the two religions does not always, and in all 
particulars, coincide with legal and liberal in eccle- 
siastical position. The christology of Paul is less 
humanitarian, his redemptorial doctrine, notwith- 
standing his polemics against the law, has more of 
a legal complexion, than the views of the old Jeru- 
salem Church, so far as we can judge from the scanty 
and uncertain notices which have reached us. In 
subsequent divisions of the ecclesiastical world, the 
Catholic party, while always legalizing in matters 
of Church polity, have often adopted more liberal 
views of questions purely theologic than the here- 
tics with whom they contended. On the other 


294 THE TWO RELIGIONS. 


hand, some of the sects — for example, the Monta- 
nists — have been legalists in doctrine and liberals 
in polity. Still, as a general rule, the theological 
position has, in this respect, coincided with the 
ecclesiastical. 

The century waned; Jerusalem fell: with it the 
Jewish ritual, the Jewish polity. And with the 
subversion of Temple and state, Jewish Christianity 
declined ; Hellenistic Christianity triumphed ; the 
Pauline interest triumphed; the Antiochian school 
prevailed. With the exception of a feeble remnant 
of Ebionites and Nazareans, the Jerusalem school 
and party were extinct. Monstrous to relate, a 
Gentile was chosen Bishop of Jerusalem. “In the 
fire-flames of the Holy City, God proclaimed the 
end of the Old Covenant; and the Roman, who 
for ends of his own threw a torch into the Temple, 
acted as the instrument of God in the interest of 
the Christian religion.” The century closed; Chris- 
tianity became cosmopolite ; and, notwithstanding 
heretical appearances here and there, the Christian 
Church was substantially one. But let another 
century pass, and the old contradiction bursts forth 
afresh. In the Latin and Greek churches of the 
third century, legal and liberal are reproduced with 
steep antagonism. When I speak of Latin Chris- 


1 Die Clementinen nebst den verwandten Schriften, und der 
Ebionitismus. Von Adolph Schliemann. 


THE TWO RELIGIONS. 295 


tianity as a theological influence, I am thinking 
of Africa, not of Rome. Rome was never an in- 
tellectual power in the world, though once and 
again the world’s mistress. Ecclesiastical Rome 
was always more occupied with strengthening her 
own dominion than with illustrating Christian doc- 
trine. Africa was the cradle, if not the birth-place, 
of Latin Christianity. On the northern coast of 
that continent, and especially in Carthage, — how 
planted, we know not,—there had sprung up a 
Church, which makes its first appearance in Chris- 
tian history as a full-grown power and a mighty 
influence, in the time and person of Tertullian. 
The Greek Church dates from Paul. The Greco- 
Egyptian branch of it, its most intellectual and 
characteristic representative, — the Church at Alex- 
andria, —had already illustrated the second cen- 
tury and itself with the writings of Clemens. 
Thus, Africa, by a strange destiny, had become 
the focus of the Christian world, the home of the 
two representative Churches of the post-apostolic 
time, — at once the palestra and the mart of those 
spirits and ideas, the trace of which remains to this 
day. In Alexandria, gnosis contended with reve- 
lation ; in Carthage, independency struggled with 
ecclesiastical rule: but both of these Churches 
contrasted each other as exponents of speculative 
and dogmatic theology, of liberal and legal religion. 


7 


M. Charpentier, in a pleasant essay on the literary 
characteristics of the two Churches, speaks of the 
different training of the writers of each. The 
Greek Fathers had come into the Church from the 
schools; the Latin, from the bar. “Sortis par la 
plupart, les écrivains grecs, de l’école des sophistes, 
les écrivains latins, de l’enceinte du barreau, ils ont, 
les uns et les autres, retenu cette double origine.” ! 
We are inclined to think that their spiritual, as well 
as their literary, traits are referable in part to this 
previous discipline. The habit of the schools is 
free inquiry ; the habit of the bar is sharp decision 
by precedent and authority. The one is discursive ; 
the other, pragmatical: the one, liberal; the other, 
legal. 

As a type of the Latin spirit, and a normal 
instance of legal Christianity, let us take Tertul- 
lian, first of the Latin Fathers. Tertullian was a 
heretic in ecclesiastical position; but when had 
ever Orthodoxy, in the popular sense of the word, 
a more perfect representative? We speak of Au- 
gustine as the Father of Calvinism ; but the prac- 
tical spirit of Calvinism is more fitly imaged in 
Tertullian. So assured and grim and pitiless! 
The Christian Church has had no abler writer and 
no greater bigot. How fiercely his intolerant zeal 
flashes out in his judgment of the polytheists! » 


296 THE TWO RELIGIONS. 


1 Etudes sur les Péres de l’Eglise. Par J. P. Charpentier. 


THE TWO RELIGIONS. 297 


How he burns and rages against them! How he 
revels in the thought of their sure damnation, and 
gloats over the picture of everlasting burnings! 
** Oh, how I shall admire, how laugh, how exult, 
when I behold so many proud monarchs, so many 
fancied gods, groaning in the lowest abyss of dark- 
ness!—so many magistrates, who persecuted the 
name of Christ, melting in fiercer flames than they 
kindled against the Christians!” What contempt 
he pours on ancient philosophy and philosophers ! 
“ What has the Academy to do with the Church, 
Christ with Plato, Jerusalem with Athens?” With 
what self-righteous disdain and conscious superior- 
ity he sneers even at Socrates, and ridicules his 
Demon, and all his pretended wisdom! Paul and 
John had not hesitated to acknowledge traces of 
moral truth and a divine spirit even in the Gentile 
world; but Tertullian flouts the notion of a pos- 
sible wisdom or knowledge that was not derived 
from the Christian revelation. What could Socra- 
tes know of the soul? What right had he to think 
or talk about it? Christ had not yet come into the 
world ;! consequently, no knowledge of spiritual 
things, no means of investigating, no possibility of 
apprehending them. All that the Gentile philoso- 
sine Christo? Cui Christus exploratus sine Spiritu Sancto? . . 


Sane Socrates facilius diverso spiritu agebatur.””—Tertull. De 
Anima 


298 THE TWO RELIGIONS. 


phers could say on these subjects was of devilish 
origin, — “secundum Pythii demonis suffragium.” 
Christianity was not only a revelation transcending 
philosophy, but a fierce cartel hurled at human - 
wisdom. It was not enough to say that the gos- 
pel was the source of the highest knowledge and 
the fullest truth in relation to such matters. Ter- 
tullian’s religion required him to believe that all 
previous theorizing, all the conclusions of the 
“natural man” on the subject, were adverse to 
the gospel; that this wisdom not only “ descendeth 
not from above,” but must needs be “ earthly, sen- 
sual, devilish.” His faith rejected with scorn the aid 
of reason. ‘Credo quia impossibile est.” “The 
Christian religion,” says Maurice,! in his admirable 
eritique of this Father, “‘ was good for nothing in 
his eyes, unless he could show that it set aside all 
that honest men had been thinking of and feeling 
before it was proclaimed. That was the proof that 
it came from God; that was the only comfortable 
evidence Tertullian could have that the inheri- 
tance which had been left him was safe against 
invaders.” 

This, in every period of the Church, has been 
the position of legal Christianity in respect to the 
claims of philosophy and the rights of the mind. 


1 Lectures on the Ecclesiastical History of the First and Second 
Centuries. 


THE TWO RELIGIONS. 299 


It loves to set revelation against humanity, instead 
of seeking to reconcile the two. So far from find- 
ing the word of God in human reason, and human 
reason in the word of God, it delights to sow 
enmity between them. It declares eternal feud to 
be their normal relation. Instead of adjusting 
itself with the natural faith and universal heart 
of man, it assumes in advance that human nature 
is an enemy, and must be crushed and trampled in 
the dust, in order to receive its impress. Compare 
with these flings of Tertullian the tone of discourse 
on such matters in modern writers of like faith. 
Thus, the author of the “ Greyson Letters,” quite 
in the spirit of the old African, assures his corre- 
spondent that Christianity goes desperately against 
the grain of human nature. “ You cannot say that 
the Book has not given you every advantage ; for 
never was there one which more irritates the pride 
and prejudices of mankind, which presents greater 
obstacles to its reception, morally and intellectu- 
ally ; so that it is amongst the most unaccountable 
things to me, not that it should be rejected by some, 
but that it should be accepted by any. . . . Said 
an old Deist, ‘I do not perceive in myself any 
inclination to receive the New Testament.’ There 
spake not Deism only, but Human Nature.” 

As Tertullian in the Latin Church is the type of 
legalism, so Origen in the Greek Church may be 


300 THE TWO RELIGIONS. 


regarded as, next to St. Paul, the truest represen- 
tative of liberal Christianity. In him as in few 
beside — perhaps we should say in none beside — 
were combined the scholar and the saint. Second 
to none in purity and singleness of heart, in self- 
denial, humility, devotion, in all Christian virtues, 
he added “to virtue knowledge,” surpassing all 
others in intellectual activity and intellectual at- 
tainments, in the grasp of his thought, in the 
vastness of his erudition. Neander calls him the 
founder of sacred learning; that is, of the scien- 
tific study of the Bible and all related branches of 
knowledge. He introduced into Christian study a 
spirit of inquiry, and an element of intellectual 
freedom which ages of bigotry were unable wholly 
to eradicate thence. Unlike Tertullian, he believed 
in philosophy, and believed in reason. He believed 
in the necessary and perfect harmony of reason and 
revelation. Possessed with this conviction, his 
genius led him to spiritualize and allegorize what- 
ever seemed contrary to reason in the letter of 
Scripture, and especially all that savors of anthro- 
pomorphism. Tertullian did not shun to ascribe 
corporeity to God. He must have an eye to watch 
man; a hand to protect him; an ear to hear him; 
a heart to love him. Origen, on the contrary, is 
careful to divest the idea of God of all material 
attributes: he conceives of Deity as pure spirit, 


THE TWO RELIGIONS. 301 


infinitely transcending all human conception. He 
understands figuratively all those passages in the 
Bible which speak humanly of God. He cannot 
accept, in its literal sense, the Mosaic account of 
creation. A creation that had its beginning but a 
few thousand years ago is inconsistent with the 
nature of God, who must have created from all 
eternity. The existing universe must have been 
preceded by an infinite series of creations. He be- 
lieves in the pre-existence of human souls. What 
is called native depravity is the taint contracted by 
transgression in some previous state. He believes 
in a plurality of intelligent and spiritual worlds, 
and regards the death of Christ as a sacrifice whose 
efficacy is not confined to this our earth, but 
includes the spheres in its complete grace, and 
carries atonement into all the heavens. His escha- 
tology is as generous as his theory of redemption. 
He believes that all souls will be finally restored 
to God ; Satan himself, as the Scottish bard hoped, 
will take thought and mend; the universe in all 
its abysses will be purged of evil, — 


“ And Hell itself shall pass away, 
And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.” 


I do not propose Origen, no more than Tertul- 
lian, as authority or model; but only as type in his 
own kind, as the foremost instance of liberalism in 
religion. He represents the faults as well as the 


302 THE TWO RELIGIONS. 


merits of that kind. In him the philosopher out- 
runs the evangelist. The bold speculations in 
which he indulges, if not antagonistic to the teach- 
ings of the gospel, are foreign to the purport and 
simplicity of the gospel, which subordinates curi- 
ous inquiry to moral truth,— the knowledge that 
puffeth up to the love that buildeth up. 

Come down two centuries later, and the never- 
failing dualism reappears in the conflict of Augus- 
tinian and Pelagian anthropology. The Church, 
already divided on the nature of Christ, divides 
now on the nature of man, —on human free-will ; 
on the agency which the individual has in his own 
salvation. Augustine, who never entirely outgrew 
his early Manichean determinations, and whose 
theology was colored by his personal experience of 
sin, was deeply impressed with the might and ex- 
tent of the empire of evil, which he conceived as 
reaching down to the very core of man’s being. 
He could see in human nature only the arena of a 
contest between God and Satan. The human will 
is entirely passive in this conflict ; it is not human 
nature that acts when one is converted and saved, 
but grace in the place of human nature, supplant- 
ing it, replacing it. The regenerate man is not a 
human original, but only a particular vessel into 
which God’s grace is poured. Opposed to this is 
the liberal, Pelagian view, which recognizes human 


THE TWO RELIGIONS. 303 


nature as itself an independent, sacred reality. 
Immensely important is this view,—far beyond 
its theological bearings, and beyond the compre- 
hension of that time,—the first emphatic asser- 
tion, within the pale of the Christian Church, of 
the dignity of human nature. It is the basis of 
all civil and personal liberty. The Stoics had a 
glimpse of it ; the gospel reveals it ; the very term 
“Son of man” implies it; but this is its first dis- 
tinct recognition as a Christian doctrine. Pelagius 
himself is not the best representative of this view, 
— himself less liberal on the whole, and with more 
of a legal cast in his doctrine, than Augustine, who 
as a thinker was immeasurably his superior. But 
this particular view of human nature (with him it 
was rather an instinct than a vision) soon found 
other and worthier exponents, as the liberal side of 
Christian anthropology contrasted with the legal 
positions of St. Augustine. 

In the seventh century, the old antagonism 
breaks forth afresh in the Monothelite controversy 
of the Greek Church, repeating in substance the 
Nestorian and Monophysite disputes of the fifth 
and sixth. Maximus here represents the liberal, 
and Theodore the legal, side. In the ninth century, 
we have the question of the Double Predestination, 
— Gottschalk taking the legal view, and Scotus 
Erigena the liberal. And again, in the thirteenth, 


304 THE TWO RELIGIONS. 


we have the practical antithesis of St. Dominic and 
St. Francis. 

It is not my intent to pursue this parallel 
through all the epochs of ecclesiastical history. I 
will only remind the reader how the great Refor- 
mation, which at first combined and concentred the 
spirits and beliefs opposed to Romanism, soon dis- 
parted into two streams, into two religions, — iron- 
hearted Calvin leading and organizing Protestant 
legalism ; Arminius, somewhat later, representing 
liberal Protestantism. 


From their theological characteristics, if now we 
pass to their practical aspects, and survey the 
working of the two religions in organized com- 
munions, we are struck with the very decided 
superiority of legal over liberal Christianity as a 
method of church-life. It needs but a glance at 
ecclesiastical organizations to perceive what mighty 
advantage a church derives from legal views and a 
legalizing spirit. It is not too much to say, that a 
church is powerful and prosperous in precisely that 
degree in which it is possessed with such views and 
such a spirit. The Church of Rome, the most 
powerful spiritual organism the world has known, 
is a standing witness of the truth of this position. 
The Church of Rome owes all her strength to this 
cause. Whatever may have been her doctrinal 


THE TWO RELIGIONS. 305 


decisions when defining her faith in relation to the 
heresies that sprung from her bosom, — whether 
narrower or larger than the views she eliminated, 
—the absolute authority of those decisions was 
always a fundamental point in her faith. Her in- 
tense ecclesiastical consciousness (infallibility) gave 
her decisions a binding force within the pale of her 
communion, in which the very essence of legalism 
consists. She broke with the Greek Church on a 
question of reform. Espousing herself the conser- 
vative side (which was also in this case the popular 
side), she gained new strength from the schism. 
The Greek Church, taking the side of reform, and 
thereby condemning her own practice, seeking 
orthodoxy at the expense of infallibility, failed to 
maintain her ground, and was finally worsted in 
the contest. A change of government restored 
idolatry to Constantinople, but not cecumenical 
prestige. With two successive empires for her 
allies, and historical antecedents in her favor, the 
“Orthodox” Church has never wielded the power 
of the “ Catholic,” with often an empire for her ad- 
versary. The Albigenses, —the most liberal and 
most powerful antagonists of papal rule in the 
thirteenth century, having virtual control of the 
fairest and most civilized portion of Europe, but 
without dogmatic authority or bond, and only 


agreeing in dissent from the Church, — were com- 
20 


306 THE TWO RELIGIONS. 


pletely exterminated by the sword of De Montfort 
and the bloodhounds of Dominie. On the other 
hand, the Waldenses, who with equal hostility to 
Rome combined a more stringent faith, survived 
the most: savage persecution, and continue to this 
day. 

Need I point to Protestant Christendom, to our 
own most Protestant land, for illustrations? The 
superior strength of the self-styled “‘ Evangelical” 
sects, as compared with the Liberal, stares us in 
the face. The Unitarians, with every advantage 
in the way of culture and of literary ability, have 
not only made, relatively to other sects, no appre- 
ciable progress, but have never organized with cor- 
porate effect, have never united in any uniform 
policy, have never cordially co-operated in any sys- 
tematic attempt to extend their communion. Their 
theological views they have propagated by books 
and otherwise; their corporate influence they have 
not extended, have not even maintained. The 
management of the first University in the land had 
fallen providentially into their hands; they endowed 
it munificently, increased its professorial staff, and 
raised the standard of education, not only for that 
college, but through it, indirectly, for every college 
in the land.- They might with all legal propriety 
have made it ancillary to their own ecclesiastical 
growth. They might, as other sects would have 


THE TWO RELIGIONS. 307 


done in their place, have made it, what other col- 
leges are, a sectarian institution. Far from this, 
they religiously refrained from any effort in that 
direction. I pass no judgment on this conduct; I 
only cite it as an instance of that lack of organic 
strength and ecclesiastical consciousness which 
seems to ,be inseparable from liberalism in re- 
ligion. If corporate zeal were the test and meas- 
ure of truth, Unitarianism would stand convicted 
and condemned by irrefragable fact. I often think, 
on the contrary, that zeal and truth are inversely 
related, — that the clearer men see, the less con- 
cerned they are to communicate their vision. 
Whatever its theological merits, Liberal Chris- 
tianity is not, ecclesiastically, a good working faith. 
It dwells too much in inquiry, is too “ sicklied o’er 
with the pale cast of thought,” to succeed in sec- 
tarian ‘‘enterprises of great pith and moment.” 
Nor is this its only defect. Not only does it fail in 
propagandism, not only does it lack the power to 
organize,—the corporate zeal which shows itself in 
vigorous and effective coaction, — but in every kind 
of religious demonstration, in all that is technically 
called religion, as distinct from moral and philan- 
thropic action, it falls far short of the mark and 
standard of legal faith. The religious sentiment, 
properly so called, is less active,— or perhaps we 
should say less concrete and demonstrative, —-in 


308 THE TWO RELIGIONS. { 


Christians of liberal views, than in those of the 
legal communions. Popularly speaking, the former 
are less religious than the latter. It is useless to 
deny this; candor compels me to give to legal 
Christianity the preference in this particular. At 
what expense of other and equal good this advan- 
tage is maintained, is a point to be considered by 
all who would weigh the comparative merits of the 
two systems. It has been alleged by its adversa- 
ries that Unitarianism leads to irreligion. What- 
ever may be thought of the animus of that charge, 
it is not so utterly baseless as the prompt repudia- 
tion of it by the Unitarian consciousness might 
seem to imply. Viewed in one aspect, it is false, 
and even recklessly false; considered in another, it 
is not without some color of truth. It is false as a 
matter of fact, inasmuch as the larger proportion of 
unbelievers are notoriously the offspring of “ Or- 
thodoxy,” and have come from the ranks of the 
legal sects. But, theoretically, it is true so far as 
this: Romanism being the positive extreme of the 
Christian world, and irreligion the negative, Uni- 
tarianism is further removed from the positive, 
consequently nearer the negative, than most of 
the Protestant systems. As Romanism has more 
of positive religion than Protestant Orthodoxy, so 
Orthodoxy has more of positive religion than Uni- 
tarianism. The charge is true in the same sense in 


THE TWO RELIGIONS. 309 


which, from the Catholic point of view, Protes- 
tantism leads to infidelity. Or again, Unitari- 
anism leads to irreligion in precisely that sense in 
which Orthodoxy leads to fanaticism,— which is 
no better than irreligion, and leads to hypocrisy, 
which is worse. It is a step in that direction ; but 
it does not follow that all the succeeding steps 
must be taken until the goal is reached. It is a 
question of comparative approximation. If one 
sect is nearer irreligion than another, that other is 
nearer to it than its antecedent, and soon. Heaven 
help us if we are never to move in any direction, 
because that direction may be followed to excess! 
In that case, Protestantism is the first misstep; and 
consistency would require the Protestant who re- 
coils from a liberal faith, on the score of irreligion, 
to pursue the retrograde movement until he lands 
in the Church of Rome. 

Religion is not a finality, but means to an end. 
The end is the perfect man. The two religions 
must be judged by the measure in which they con- 
tribute thereto. The first and principal function of 
all religion is to aid the development of the moral 
nature, to further moral purity and power. Only 
so far as it answers this end directly or indirectly, 
by quickening the conscience, by strengthening 
the social bond, or by fostering and stimulat- 
ing beautiful art,—only so far as it makes men 


810 THE TWO RELIGIONS. 


morally better,—is religion any real benefit to 
man. Sad to say, religion has not always wrought 
to this effect; and when it has not, it has been no 
blessing, but a curse. When the light that is in 
man is turned to darkness, that darkness is deeper 
and deadlier than mere brute night. When religion 
ceases to be regarded as means to an end, as an aid 
to moral and spiritual culture, a handle by which 
the soul lays hold of the eternal,— when it loses 
this function in men’s apprehension, and becomes 
an end in itself, an exclusive and absorbing end, 
an end above truth and righteousness, — then it is 
apt to become a substitute for truth and righteous- 
ness, and then the light that is in man is turned to 
darkness and to death. What different growths of 
the spirit ostensibly spring from the same root! 
The belief in the invisible, which lies at the basis 
of all religions, — how diverse its action, how con- 
trary its manifestations, according to the nature in 
which it is rooted and the nurture it receives! 
The same principle which made a Paul out of 
Saul and a saint out of Augustine, which ravished 
the soul of St. Francis and transfigured the life 
of Elizabeth, which lit up the eyes of Raphael’s 
Marys and conjugated the notes of the Miserere, — 
that same principle macerated the bodies of the 
Encratites, and drove men to the tops of columns 
and into the bowels of the earth, and put a scourge 


THi TWO RELIGIONS. 311 


into the hands of Piety, and planned the wiles of 
the Inquisition, and enacted the fiery Acts of Faith. 
* Doth a fountain send forth at the same place 
sweet waters and bitter,” godlike charities and 
hellish crimes? Yes, human nature is such a foun- 
tain, and religion the prophet that unlocks its 
secret life. Human nature, the individual nature, 
is deeper than any system, and stronger than any 
faith. It reacts on religion in the same measure in 
which it is actuated by it. Religion is not respon- 
sible for all the aberrations it has seemed to sanc- 
tion, or that rage in its name. 
“Though all things foul would wear the brows of grace, 
Yet grace must still look so.” 

At the same time, it is clear that different systems 
of religion, received by tradition from the visible 
Church, will act very differently on human nature; 
and, according to their proper complexion, will 
quicken or restrain, dissuade or reassure, the na- 
tive proclivities of souls. On the whole, then, a 
religion may be judged by its moral fruits; or, 
since the causal relation of subject and accident 
in such matters is indemonstrable, let us say its 
moral accompaniments. 

Tried by this test, and compared in this aspect, 
the two religions exhibit each their lights and their 
shades according to their kind. Neither will be 
found inglorious, and neither without spot. Great 


512 THE TWO RELIGIONS. 


and holy characters and lives, noble men and noble 
women, have been reared under both. Each has 
had its heroes and confessors, and neither may 
claim precedence of the other in the heraldry of 
grace. Yet here also the two religions preserve 
their distinctive types. They differ in their moral 
traits, as in their intellectual. The characteristic 
virtue of the legal is scrupulous sobriety, that of 
the liberal, active beneficence; the one is more 
strict in its way of life, the other more intent on 
works of love; the one aspires to personal holiness, 
the other delights in public good; the one, con- 
temning and renouncing the world, presses steadily 
on to the kingdom of God, the other would estab- 
lish that kingdom in the world. The prayer of the 
one is, May we come into Thy kingdom! The 
prayer of the other is, May Thy kingdom come! 
Likewise the immoralities incident to either as a 
visible communion, the vices most often associated 
with them, are respectively and characteristically 
proper to each kind. The vices of the liberal are in- 
dolence, indifference, eudemonism, self-indulgence, 
fleshly lusts, and sensual excess. The vices of the 
legal are hypocrisy, falsehood, dishonesty in busi- 
ness, treachery, cruelty. I do not mean, of course, 
to say that either religion engenders these results ; 
I am not speaking of necessary consequences, but 
of common accompaniments. 


THE TWO RELIGIONS. 313 


There is one diagnostic of the two religions, and 
that perhaps the most definitive of any, of which as 
yet I have not spoken, and can only now point to 
in passing, for want of room to do it justice. I 
mean the attitude they respectively assume in 
relation to public and private amusements. Legal 
religion is prevailingly ascetic; it regards the 
world as essentially godless, a Vanity Fair, a pass- 
ing trial, a transient obstruction, with which the 
Christian has nothing to do but to make his pil- 
grim’s progress through it, unbending and succinct, 
drawing close his robe of righteousness, that it take 
no defilement in the miry passage. It professes no 
sympathy with gayety and mirth, is cold to all 
pleasures but those which 


“Rise from things unseen, 
Beyond this world and time ;” 


and turns with special aversion from the dance and 
the play, if not as sinful in themselves, yet as 
perilously dwelling in the neighborhood of sin. If 
in any community it had full scope and unqualified 
sway, it would banish all this, spread sackcloth and 
ashes, and establish perpetual Lent. Liberal re- 
ligion secularizes without reserve ; it feels itself. at 
home in the world, sanctions festive enjoyment, 
contends for public amusements, tolerates theatre 
and ball, with perhaps too little discrimination. If 
in any community it had full sway, there is reason 


314 THE TWO RELIGIONS. 


to fear that society would miss the earnest shadow 
of the law, that the passions which thirst for enjoy- 
ment would never have done with their carnival, 
that “Joy and Feast” would encroach too far on 
the awfulness of life. 

It has been my aim, in this brief sketch, to 
render strict justice to both of the religions which 
divide mankind, —to exhibit fairly their prominent 
traits, without disparagement and without exagger- 
ation. It could never occur to me to pronounce 
definitively respecting their comparative value on 
the whole. As soon should I think of passing judg- 
ment respecting the comparative value of man and 
woman, or of body and spirit, or any two necessary 
correlates of being. Neither is best, and neither is 
sufficient in itself. Both are necessary, and both 
are partial, and both are permanent types. Each 
is the other’s complement, and neither could be 
missed without loss to the world. Both will con- 
tinue to exist in nearly the same proportions as 
now. I have no misgivings respecting the cause of 
Liberal Christianity, whatever may become of the 
churches that embody it. If these fail, other com- 
munions will arise in their place, or legal com- 
munions will enlarge themselves to receive this 
element. The gospel has this side, human nature 
has this side ; and both will be sure to find expres- 
sion. I have no misgivings about Orthodoxy. 


THE TWO RELIGIONS. 315 


I rejoice in Orthodoxy, and am deeply conscious 
how ill this factor could be missed from the sum of 
the forces that rule the world. Both religions will 
find their own. He who craves the largest liberty 
of thought and worship, and still affects the Chris- 
tian name, and still acknowledges the mastership 
of Christ, will be naturally drawn to the liberal 
side. He who requires for his edification the strong 
embrace of a close communion, the pulsing life of 
a vigorous organism, the warm breath of the 
crowded conventicle, the frequent assembly, the 
large operation, the triumphant report, will seek a 
lodgement in some legal church. Happily, the 
Christian idea is wide enough for both. 


XII. 


THE MYTHICAL ELEMENT IN THE NEW 
TESTAMENT. 


Sirocopsrepov kal cmovdaidrepov wolnois teroplas éorw. 
ARISTOTLE. 


HEN Dr. Strauss, thirty-five years ago,! in 

his “ Life of Jesus,” advanced and applied 

to the narrative of the New Testament a theory 
of interpretation, in principle the same with that 
which a Christian Father of the third century had 
employed in his treatment of the Old, the theolog- 
ical world was profoundly shocked by what seemed 
to be the last impiety of criticism. A hundred 
champions rushed with drawn pen to the rescue of 
the old interpretation of the text. The truth of 
Christianity was supposed to be assailed; the belief 
in Christianity as divine revelation was felt to be 
imperilled by a theory which substituted mythical 
figment for historic fact. That no such harm was 
intended, or was likely to ensue from his labors, 
the author himself assures us in the preface to that 
extraordinary work. ‘ The inner kernel of Chris- 
tian faith,” he declares, “is entirely independent of 


1 This was written in 1871. 


—_—o,- 


THE MYTHICAL ELEMENT, ETC. 317 


all such criticism. Christ’s supernatural birth, his 
miracles, his resurrection and ascension, remain 
eternal truths, however their reality as facts of his- 
tory may be called in question.” 

In this declaration I find the motive of the 
following dissertation. 

How far does the cause of Christianity depend 
on the facts, or alleged facts, of the Gospel narra- 
tive? Or, to state the question in other words, Is 
the truth of Christianity identical and conterminous 
with the literal truth of its record? 

It is obvious at the start that a certain amount of 
historic truth must be assumed as implied in the 
very existence of any religion which dates from a per- 
sonal founder whose thought it professes to embody, 
and whose name it bears. Christianity purports to 
be founded on the ministry of a Jewish teacher, 
entitled by his followers “the Christ.” We have 
the testimony of a nearly contemporary Latin his- 
torian to the fact that an individual so named was 
the leader of a numerous body of religionists, and 
was put to death by command of Pontius Pilate, 
in the reign of Tiberius. But, without this confir- 
mation, the very existence of the Christian Church 
compels us to accept as historic facts, the ministry 
of Jesus, the strong impression of his word and 
character, his purity of manners and moral great- 
ness, his life of beneficent action, his martyr death, 


3818 THE MYTHICAL ELEMENT 


and his manifestation to his disciples after death, | 
however that manifestation be conceived, whether 
as subjective experience or as objective reality. So 
much, beyond all reasonable question, must stand 
as history, vouched by documentary evidence, and 
by the existence, in the first century, of a Church 
universally diffused, which affirmed these facts as 
the ground of its being, and in the strength of them 
overcame the world. 

But, observe, it is Christianity that assures the 
truth of these facts, and not the facts that prove 
Christianity. To base the truth of Christianity on 
the credibility, in every particular, of the Gospel 
record; to measure the claims of the religion by 
the strict historic verity of all the narrative of the 
New Testament, is to prejudice the Christian cause 
in the judgment of competent critics. It is to 
challenge the cavil and counter-demonstration of 
unbelief. 

Christianity assures the truth of certain facts; 
but by no means of all the facts affirmed by the 
writers of the New Testament. Faith in Chris- 
tianity as divine dispensation does not imply, and 
must not be held to the belief, as veritable history, 
of all that is recorded in the Gospel. Not the his- 
toric sense, but the spiritual import; not the facts, 
but the ideas of the Gospel, are the genuine topics 
of faith. 


IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. 319 


Christianity, like every other religion, has its 
mythology, —a mythology so intertwined with the 
veritable facts of its early history, so braided and 
welded with its first beginnings, that history and 
myth are not always distinguishable the one from 
the other. Every historic religion, that has won for 
itself a conspicuous place in the world’s history, 
has evolved from a core of fact a nimbus of legen- 
dary matter which criticism cannot always separate, 
and which the popular faith does not seek to sep- 
arate, from the solid parts of the system. And in 
one view the legends or myths which gather around 
the initial stage of any religion are as true as the 
vouched and substantial facts of its record: they 
are a product of the same spirit working, in the 
one case, in the acts and experiences; in the other, 
in the visions, the ideas, the literary activity of the 
faithful. It is one and the same motive that in- 
spires both the writer and the doer. 

When I speak of historic religions, I mean such 
as trace their origin to some historic personage, and 
bear the impress of his idea, in contradistinction to 
those which have sprung from unknown sources, 
the wild growths of Nature-worship as found in 
ancient Egypt, in the Indian and Scandinavian 
peninsulas, and in Greece. 

No distinction in religion is so fundamental as 
that between the wild religions and those which 


320 THE MYTHICAL ELEMENT 


have sprung from the word of a human sower 
going forth to sow; the religions of sense and 
those of reflection, the ‘“‘natural” and the ‘“re- 
vealed.” The prime characteristic of the former is 
pelytheism ; that of the latter, monotheism. Mosa- 
ism, Mohammedism, Buddhism, —so far as it knows 
any God,—even Parsism, is monotheistic in so 
much as its dualism is resolvable into the final 
triumph and supremacy of the good. No founder 
of a religion ever taught a plurality of gods. - 
Another characteristic of the wild religions is 
their transitoriness. The Egyptian, the Greco- 
Roman, the Scandinavian, perished long ago. 
Bramanism, the last survivor of the ancient poly- 
theisms, is fast melting beneath the advancing 
heats of Islam and the Brahmo Somaj. The ‘“‘re- 
vealed” religions on the contrary are permanent. 
No religion of historic origin, so far as I know, has 
ever died out. Judaism, the eldest of them, still 
flourishes: never since the destruction of Jerusalem” 
has it flourished with a greener leaf than now. 
Mohammedism is pushing its conquests faster than 
Christianity in the East; Parsism is still strong in 
Bengal; Buddhism in one or another form calls a 
thid part of the population of the globe its own. 
All religions have their mythologies, but with 
this distinction: polytheism is mythical in prin- 
ciple as well as form, in soul as well as body, and 





IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. 321 


mythical throughout. Its whole being is myth. 
Whatever of scientific or historic truth may be hid- 
den in any of its legends, such as the labors of Her- 
akles, the fire-theft of Prometheus, or the rape of 
Europa, is matter of pure conjecture. In the “ re- 
vealed” religions, on the contrary, the mythical is 
incidental, not principal, and always subordinate to 
doctrine or fact. Always the truth shines through 
the myth, explains it, justifies it. 

Before proceeding any farther, I desire to explain 
what I mean by myth in this connection. I shall 
not attempt a philosophic definition, but content 
myself with this general determination. I call any 
story a myth which for good reasons is not to be 
taken historically, and yet is not a wilful fabrica- 
tion with intent to deceive, but the natural growth 
of wonder and tradition, or a product of the Spirit 
uttering itself in a narrative form. The myth may 
be the result of exaggeration, the expansion of a 
veritable fact which gathers increments and a posse 
comitatus of additions as it travels from mouth to 
ear and ear to mouth in the carriage of verbal 
report; or it may be the reflection of a fact in the 
mind of a writer, who reproduces it in his writing 
with the color and proportions it has taken in his 
conception; or 1t may be the poetic embodiment of 
a mental experience; or it may be what Strauss 

21 


322 THE MYTHICAL ELEMENT 


calls “‘the deposit! of an idea,” and another critic 
‘*‘an idea shaped into fact.”” I think we have ex- 
amples of all these mythical formations in the New 
Testament; and I hold that the credit of the 
Gospel in things essential is nowise impaired, nor 
the claim of Christianity as divine revelation com- 
promised, by a frank admission of this admixture 
of fancy with fact in its record. On the contrary, 
I deem it important, in view of the vulgar radical- 
ism which confounds the Christian dispensation and 
its record, soul and body, in one judgment, to 
separate the literary question from the spiritual, » 
and to free the cause of faith from the burden of 
the letter. 
It has been assumed that the proof of divine 
revelation rests on precisely those portions of the 
record which are most offensive to unbelief. On 
this assumption the Christian apologists of a former 
generation grounded their plea. Prove that we 
have the testimony of eye-witnesses to the miracles 
recorded in the Gospels, and Christianity is shown 
to be a divine revelation. In the absence of such 
proof (the inference is) Christianity can no longer 
claim to be, in the words of Paul, ‘‘the power of 
God unto salvation.” This is substantially Paley’s 
argument. Planting himself on the premise that 
revelation is impossible without miracles, in which 


1 Niederschlag. 


IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. o2e 


it is implied that miracles prove revelation, he 
labors to establish two propositions: 1. “That 
there is satisfactory evidence that many profess- 
ing to be original witnesses of the Christian mir- 
acles passed their lives in dangers, labors, and 
sufferings, voluntarily undergone in attestation of 
the accounts which they delivered, and solely in 
consequence of their belief in those accounts ; and 
that they also submitted from the same motives to 
new rules of conduct.” 2. “That there is not 
satisfactory evidence that persons pretending to be 
original witnesses of any other similar miracles 
have acted in the same manner in attestation of 
the accounts which they delivered, and solely in 
consequence of their belief in the truth of those 
accounts.” The argument is stated with the 
characteristic clearness of the author, and as well 
supported perhaps as Anglican church-erudition in 
those days would allow; but the case is not made 
out, and, if it were, the argument fails to satisfy 
the sceptical mind of to-day. To say nothing of its 
gross misconception of the nature of revelation, 
which it makes external instead of internal, a stun- 
ning of the senses instead of mental illumination, 
an appeal to prodigy and not its own sufficient 
witness, — waiving this objection, the argument 
fails when confronted with the fact that, in spite of 
the evidence which scholars and critics the most 


324 THE MYTHICAL ELEMENT 





learned and acute of all time have arrayed in sup- 
port of the genuineness of the Gospels, the number 
is nowise diminished, but rather increases, of intel- 
ligent minds that find themselves unable, on the 
faith of any book, however ancient, to receive as 
authentic a tale of wonders which contradict their 
experience of the limits of human ability and their 
faith in the continuity of Nature. For myself, I 
beg to say, in passing, I am not of this number. I 
do not feel the force of the objection against mir- 
acles drawn from this alleged constancy of Nature, 
which it seems to me reduces the course of human 
events to a dead mechanical sequence, makes no 
allowance for any reserved power in Nature or any 
incalculable forces of the Spirit, and virtually rules 
God, the present inworking God, out of the uni- 
verse. I can believe in any miracle which does not 
actually and demonstrably contravene and nullify 
ascertained laws, however phenomenally foreign to 
Nature’s ordinary course. But the possibility of 
miracles is one thing, the possibility of proving 
them another. With such views as these objectors 
entertain of the constancy of Nature, I confess that 
no testimony, not even the written affidavit of a 
dozen witnesses taken on the spot, supposing that 
we had it, would suffice to convince me of the truth 
of marvels occurring two thousand years ago, of 
the kind recounted in the Gospels. My Christian 


IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. 325 


prepossessions might incline me to believe in them: 
the weight of evidence would not. No wise de- 
fender of the Christian cause, at the present day, 
will rest his plea on the issue to which Paley com- 
mitted its claims. After all that Biblical critics 
and antiquarian research have raked from the dust 
of antiquity in proof of the genuineness and authen- 
ticity of the books of the New Testament, credi- 
bility still labors with the fact that the age in which 
these books were received and put in circulation 
was one in which the science of criticism as de- 
veloped by the moderns—the science which scru- 
tinizes statements, balances evidence for and against, 
and sifts the true from the false —did not exist; an 
age when a boundless credulity disposed men to 
believe in wonders as readily as in ordinary events, 
requiring no stronger proof in the case of the 
former than sufficed to establish the latter, namely, 
hearsay and vulgar report; an age when literary 
honesty was a virtue almost unknown, and when, 
consequently, literary forgeries were as common 
as genuine productions, and transcribers of sacred 
books did not scruple to alter the text in the in- 
terest of personal views and doctrinal preposses- 
sions. The newly discovered Sinaitic Code, the 
earliest known manuscript of the New Testament, 
dates from the fourth century. Tischendorf the 
discoverer, a very orthodox critic, speaks without 


326 THE MYTHICAL ELEMENT 


reserve of the license in the treatment of the text 
apparent in this manuscript, —a license, he says, 
especially characteristic of the first three cen- 
turies. 

These considerations, though they do not dis- 
credit the essential facts of the Gospel history, — 
facts assured to us, as I have said, by the very ex- 
istence of the Christian Church, — might seem to 
excuse the hesitation of the sceptic in accepting, on 
the faith of the record, incidental marvels of a kind 
very difficult of proof at best. I recall in this con- 
nection the remarkable saying of an English divine 
of the seventeenth century. “So great, in the - 
early ages,” says Bishop Fell, “was the license of 
fiction, and so prone the facility of believing, that 
the credibility of history has been gravely em- 
barrassed thereby; and not only the secular world, 
but the Church of God, has reason to complain of 
its mythical periods.” } 

It is not in the interest of criticism, much less of 
a wilful iconoclasm, from which my whole nature 
revolts, but of Christian faith, that I advocate the 
supposition of a mythical element in the New Tes- 
tament. Iam well aware that in this advocacy I 


1 Tanta fuit primis seculis fingendi licentia, tam prona in ere- 
dendo facilitas, ut rerum gestarum fides graviter exinde labora- 
verit, nec orbis tantum terrarum sed et Dei ecclesia de temporibus 
suis mythicis merito queratur. 


IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. 327 


shall lack the consent of many good people who 
identify the cause of religion with its accidents, 
and fancy that the sanctuary is in danger when a 
blind is raised to let in new light. I respect the 
piety that clings to idols which Truth has out- 
grown, as Paul at Athens respected the religion 
which worshipped ignorantly the unknown God. 
But Truth once seen will draw piety after it, and 
new sanctities will replace the old. No Protestant 
in these days feels himself bound to accept as his- 
tory the ecclesiastical legends of the post-apostolic 
age. Some of them are quite as significant as some 
of those embodied in the canon; but no Protestant 
scruples to reject.as spurious the story of the cal- 
dron of boiling oil into which St. John was thrown 
by order of the Emperor Domitian, and from which 
he escaped unharmed, or that of the lioness which 
licked the feet of Thekla in the circus of Antioch, 
or Peter’s encounter with Christ in the suburbs of 
Rome. If we talk of evidence, I do not see but the 
miracles said to be performed by the relics of 
martyrs at Milan, attested by St. Augustine, and 
those of St. Cuthbert of Durham, attested by the 
venerable Bede, are as well substantiated as the 
opening of the prison doors and the liberation of 
the Apostles by an angel, attested by Luke. The 
Church of Rome makes no such distinction between 
the first and the following centuries: she indorses 


% 
328 THE MYTHICAL ELEMENT 4 


the miracles of all alike. But modern Protestant- 
ism draws a line of sharp separation between the 
apostolic and the post-apostolic ages. On the far- 
ther side the portents are all genuine historic facts: 
on the hither side they are all figments. While 
John the Evangelist, the last of the twelve, yet 
breathed, a miracle was still possible: his breath 
departed, it became an impossibility for evermore. 
And yet when Conyers Middleton first ran this line 
between the ages, and published his refutation of 
the claim of continued miraculous power in the 
Church, religious sensibility experienced a shock 
as great as that inflicted in our day by Strauss, 
and resented with equal indignation the affront to 
Christian faith. The author of the “ Free Inquiry” 
published in 1748 was assailed by opponents, who 
“insinuate ”’ he tells us “fears and jealousies of I 
know not what consequences dangerous to Chris- 
tianity, ruinous to the faith of history, and intro- 
ductive of universal scepticism.” The larger work 
had been preceded by an “Introductory Discourse” 
put forth as a feeler of the public pulse; for “I 
began,” he says, “to think it a duty which candor 
and prudence prescribed, not to alarm the public at 
once with an argument so strange and so little 
understood, nor to hazard an experiment so big 
with consequences till I had at first given out some 
sketch or general plan of what I was projecting.” 


IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. 329 


The experiment which required such careful prep- 
aration was to ascertain how far the English pub- 
lic in the middle of the eighteenth century would 
bear to have it said that the miracles affirmed by 
Augustine and Chrysostom and Jerome, as occur- 
ring in their day, were not as worthy of credit as 
any of the wonders recorded in the New Testa- 
ment. Up to that time, English Protestants as 
well as Romanists had given equal credence to 
both, and esteemed the former as essential to Chris- 
tian faith as the latter. Men like Waterland and 
Dodwell and Archbishop Tillotson held that mir- 
acles continued in the Church until the close of the 
third century, and were even occasionally wit- 
nessed in the fourth. Whiston, the consistent 
Arian, maintained their continuance up to the es- 
tablishment of the Athanasian doctrine in 381, and 
‘“‘that as soon as the Church became Athanasian, 
antichristian, and popish, they ceased immediately ; 
and the Devil lent it his own cheating and fatal 
powers instead.” 

To me, I confess, the position of the Church of 
Rome in this matter seems less indefensible than 
that of Middleton and modern Protestantism. 
Either deny the possibility of miracles altogether 
to finite powers, or admit their possibility in the 
second century, and the third century, as well as 
the first, and in all centuries whenever a worthy 


530 THE MYTHICAL ELEMENT 


occasion demands such agency. I can see no rea-- 
son for separating, as Middleton does, the age of 
the Apostles from all succeeding. Had he drawn 
the line between the miracles of Christ and those 
ascribed to his followers, the principle of division 
would have been more intelligible, and more ad- 
missible on the ground of ecclesiastical orthodoxy. 


But the question here is not of the possibility or 
probability of miracles, as such, in one age rather 
than another. It is a question simply of Biblical 
interpretation,— whether the literal sense of the 
record is in every case the true sense, whether 
history or fiction is the key to certain Scriptures. 
Those who insist on the verbal inspiration of the 
New Testament will be apt to likewise insist on 
the literal historic sense of every part of every nar- 
rative. And yet that mode of interpretation is by 
no means a necessary consequence or logical out- 
come of that theory. Origen believed in the ver- 
bal inspiration of the Old Testament, but Origen 
did not accept in their literal sense the Hebrew 
theophanies: he allegorized whatever seemed to 
him to degrade the idea of God. The Spirit can 
utter itself in fiction as well as fact, and in commu- 
nicating with Oriental minds was quite as likely to 
do so. And surely, for those who reject the notion 
of verbal inspiration, the way is open, in pertect 


IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. 331 


consistency with Christian faith, for such interpre- 
tation as reason may approve or the credit of the 
record be thought to require. The credit of the 
record will sometimes require an allegorical inter- 
pretation instead of a literal one. 

It is a childish limitation which in reading 
stories can feel no interest in any thing but fact; 
and a childish misconception which supposes that 
where the form is narrative, historic fact must 
needs be the substance. Recount to a little child 
a fable of Pilpay or Asop, and his questions betray 
his inability to apprehend it otherwise than as 
literal fact. He has no doubt of the truth of the 
story. ‘What did the lion say then?” he asks; 
and “‘what did the fox do next?” The maturer 
mind has also no doubt of the truth of the story, 
but sees that its truth is the moral it embodies. 
Of many of the Gospel stories the moral contained 
in them is the real truth. In the height of our late 
civil war there appeared in a popular journal a 
story entitled “A Man without a Country,” related 
with such artistic verisimilitude, such minuteness 
of detail, such grave official references, that many 
who read it not once suspected the clever inven- 
tion, and felt themselves somewhat aggrieved when 
apprised that fiction, not fact, had conveyed the 
moral intended by the genial author. But those 
who saw from the first through the veil of fiction 


332 THE MYTHICAL ELEMENT 


the needful truth and the patriotic intent, were not 
less edified than if they had believed the characters 
real, and every incident vouched by contempo- 
rary record. The story of William Tell was once 
universally received as authentic history: it was 
written in the hearts of the people of Uri; and so 
religiously were all its incidents cherished, that 
when a book appeared discrediting the sacred tra- 
dition it was publicly burned by the hangman at Al- 
torf. For five centuries the chapel on the shore of 
the Lake of the Four Cantons has commemorated 
a hero whose very existence is now questioned, of 
whom contemporary annals know nothing, of whose 
tyrant Gessler the well-kept records of the Canton 
exhibit no trace, whose apple placed as a mark for 
the father’s arrow on the head of his child is proved 
to have done a foregone service in an elder Danish 
tale. The story resolves itself into an idea. That 
idea is all that concerns us; and that idea survives, 
inexpugnable to criticism, a truth for evermore. 
Tn the world of ideas there is still a William Tell 
who defied the tyrant at Altorf, and slew him at 
Kiisnacht, and whose image will live while the 
mountains stand that gave it birth. 

And so all that is memorable out of the past, all 
that tradition has preserved, the veritable facts of 
history as well as the myths of legendary lore, pass 
finally into ideas. Only as ideas they survive, only 


IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. 333 


as ideas have they any abiding value. The anec- 
dote recorded of Aristides—his writing his own 
name at the request of an ignorant citizen on: the 
shell that should condemn him — embodies a noble 
idea which has floated down to us from the head- 
waters of Grecian history. Do we care to know 
the evidence on which it rests? If by critical in- 
vestigation the fact were made doubtful, would 
that doubt at all impair the truth of the idea? 
The story of Damon and Pythias, reported by 
Valerius Maximus, for aught that we know, may 
be a myth: suppose it could be proved to be so, 
the truth that is in it would be none the less 
precious. We do not receive it on the faith of 
the historian, but on the faith of its own intrinsic 
beauty. There is scarcely a fact in the annals of 
mankind so vouched and ascertained as to be 
beyond the reach of historic doubt, if any delver 
in ancient documents, or curious sceptic, shall see 
fit to call it in question. But, however the fact 
may be questioned, the idea remains. We have 
lived to see apologies for Judas Iscariot, and the 
literary rehabilitation of Henry VIII. But Judas 
is none the less, in popular tradition, the typical 
traitor, the impersonation of devilish malice; and 
Henry VIII. is no less the remorseless tyrant 
whose will was his God. When Napoleon I. pro- 
nounced all history a fable agreed on, he reasoned 


3834. THE MYTHICAL ELEMENT 


better perhaps than he knew. The agreement is 
the thing essential; but that agreement is never 
complete, is never final. Every original writer of 
history finds something to qualify, and often some- 
thing to reverse, in the judgment of his predeces- 
sors. How can it be otherwise, when even eye- 
witnesses disagree in their observation and report 
of the same transaction; when even in a matter so 
recent as the siege of Paris, or the conflagration of 
Chicago, the verification of facts is embarrassed by 
contradictory accounts? The best that history 
yields to philosophic thought is not facts, but 
ideas. These are all that remain at last when 
the tale is told,—all, at least, that the mind can 
appropriate, all that profits in historical studies, 
the intellectual harvest of the past. A fact means 
nothing until thought has transmuted it into itself: 
its value is simply the idea it subtends. Homer’s 
heroes are as true in this sense as those of Plu- 
tarch. Ajax and Hector are as real to me as 
Cimon or Lysander; Don Quixote’s battle with 
the windmills which Cervantes imagined is as real 
as the battle of Lepanto in which Cervantes fought ; 
and Shakspeare’s Hamlet is incomparably more 
real than the Prince of Denmark whom Saxo 
Grammaticus chronicles. 

I do not underrate the importance of facts on 
their own historic plane. The historian, as an- 


IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. 835 


nalist, is bound by the rules of his craft with con- 
scientious investigation to ascertain, substantiate, 
and establish, if he can, the precise facts of the 
period he explores. I only contend that historic 
truth is not the only truth; that a fact, —if I may 
use that term in this connection for want of a 
better, — that a fact which is not historically true 
may yet be true on a higher plane than that of 
history ; true to reason, to moral and religious sen- 
timent and human need. The story of Christ’s 
temptation is none the less true, but a great deal 
more so, when the narrative which embodies the 
interior psychological fact is conceived as myth, 
than when it is interpreted as veritable history. 
The truth that concerns us is that the Son of Man 
“was tempted in all points as we are;” not that he 
was taken by the Devil and set on a pinnacle of the 
Temple, and thence spirited away “into an exceed- 
ing high mountain.” 


We have now attained a point of view from 
which to estimate on the one hand the real import 
of what I have ventured to call the myths of the 
New Testament, and on the other hand to overrule 
the petulant radicalism which, not distinguishing 
truth of idea from truth of fact, contemns these 
legends, and perhaps contemns the Gospel, on their 
account. I have wished to show how unessential 


a 


336 THE MYTHICAL ELEMENT 


it is to the right enjoyment or profitable use of 
those portions of the record that we receive them 
as fact; to show that, if we seize and appropriate 
the idea, those narratives are quite as edifying from 
a mythical as from an historical point of view ; in 
other words, that the Holy Spirit may and does 
instruct by fiction as well as fact. If I am asked 
to draw the line which separates fact from fiction, 
or to fix the criterion by which to discriminate the 
one from the other, I answer that I do not pretend 
to decide this point for myself, much less should I 
presume to attempt to settle it for others. I am 
not disposed to dogmatize on the subject. It is a 
matter in which each must judge for himself. I 
will only say that for myself I do not place the 
line of demarcation between miracle and the un- 
miraculous, for the reason that it seems to me, as I 
said before, unphilosophical to make our every- 
day experience of the limits of human power and 
the capabilities of Nature an absolute standard by 
which to measure the possible scope of the one or 
the other. 

I content myself with a single illustration of 
what I regard as a mythical formation. My ex- 
ample is the story known as ‘*The Annunciation.” 
Luke alone, of all the evangelists, records the tale. 
The angel Gabriel is sent to a virgin named Mary, 
and surprises her with the tidings, “ Thou shalt 


IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. 337 


conceive in thy womb, and shalt bring forth a son, 
and shalt call his name Jesus. He shall be great, 
and shall be called the Son of the Highest. And 
the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his 
father David. And he shall reign over the house 
of Jacob for ever, and of his kingdom there shall 
be no end.” This beautiful legend, the most beau- 
tiful, I think, of all the legends connected with the 
birth of Christ, the favorite theme of Christian art, 
so lovingly handled by Fra Angelico, by Correggio, 
Raphael, Titian, Andrea del Sarto, and a host of 
others, is best understood as a Jewish-Christian 
conception, taking an historic form and “shaped 
into a fact.”” The legend represents the humility 
and faith of a pious maiden communing with the 
heavenly Presence, drawing to herself divine reve- 
lations of grace and promise, and thus sanctioning 
the hope so dear to every Jewish maiden, — that 
of becoming the mother of the Messiah. The sud- 
den inspiration of that hope is the angel of the 
Annunciation. 

A word more. How far is our idea of Christ 
affected by a mode of interpretation which supposes 
a mingling of mythical with historic elements in 
the Gospel record? That idea is based on the 
representations of the evangelists. Will not our 
confidence in those representations be impaired by 


this view of their contents? I see no cause to ap- 
22 


338 THE MYTHICAL ELEMENT 


prehend a result so distressing to Christian faith. 
The mythical interpretation of certain portions of 
the Gospel has no appreciable bearing on the 
character of Christ. The impartial reader of the 
record must see that the evangelists did not invent 
that character; they did not make the Jesus of 
their story; on the contrary, it was he that made 
them. It is a true saying that only a Christ could 
invent a Christ. The Christ of history is a true 
reflection of the image which Jesus of Nazareth 
imprinted on the mind of his contemporaries. In 
that image the spiritual greatness, the moral per- 
fection, are not more conspicuous than the well- 
defined individuality which permeates the story, 
and which no genius could invent. 

If the Christ of the Church, of Christian faith, 
is, as some will have it, an ideal being, it was 
Jesus of Nazareth who made the ideal. The ideal 
in him is simply the result of that disengagement 
from the earthly vestiture which death and dis- 
tance work in all who live in history. By the 
very necessity of its function, history idealizes. 
The historic figure and the individual represented 
by it, though inseparably one in substance, are not 
so identical in outline that the one exactly covers 
the other, no more and no less. The individual is 
the bodily presence as it dwells in space; the his- 
toric figure is the image of himself which the in- 


IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. 339 


dividual stamps on his time, and, so far as his 
record reaches, on all succeeding time,—his im- 
port to human kind. That image is a veritable 
portrait, but not in the sense of a fac-simile. A 
material portrait, a portrait painted with hands, if 
the painter understands his art, is not a fac-simile: 
it presents the chronic idea or characteristic mode, 
not the temporary accidents, “the fallings off, the 
vanishings,” of the person portrayed. In the hero- 
galleries of tradition, as in the visions of the Apoc- 
alypse, they are seen with white robes, and palms 
in their hands, and unwrinkled brows of grace, who 
in life were begrimed with the dust and furrowed 
with the cares of their time. St. Paul is there 
without his thorn in the flesh, Luther without his 
impatience, Washington without his fiery choler, 
Lincoln without his coarseness, Dante and Milton 
without their scorn. History strips off the indig- 
nities of earth when she dresses her heroes for im- 
mortality. And the transfigurations she gives us 
are nearer the truth than the limitations of ordi- 
nary life. The man is more truly himself in the 
epic strain of public action, with spirit braced and 
harness on, than in the subsidence and undress ot 
the closet. It is not the gossiping anecdotes, the 
spoils of the ungirt private life, so dear to anti- 
quaries and literary scavengers, but the things 
which history hastens to record, that show the 


340 THE MYTHICAL ELEMENT 


man. We must take the life at full-tide; we 
must view it in its freest determination, in its 
supreme moment, to know the deepest that is in 
him. And the deepest that is in him is the true 
man. That is his idea, his mission to the world, 
his historic significance. It is this that concerns us 
in all the great actors of history,—the historic 
person, not the individual. And the more the his- 
toric person absorbs the individual, the higher we 
rise in the scale of being until we reach the idea of 
God, from which all individuality is excluded, and 
only the Person remains, filling space and time 
with the ceaseless procession of his being. 

We misread the Gospel and reverse the true and 
divine order, if we suppose the ideal Christ to be an 
essence distilled from the historical. On the con- 
trary, the ideal Christ is the root and ground of 
the historical; and without the antecedent idea 
inspiring, commanding, the history would never 
have been. 

It has not been my intention in any thing I have 
said to make light of the record. The record to 
me is a literary relic of inestimable value, aborigi- 
nal memorial of the dearest and divinest appear- 
ance in human form that ever beamed on earthly 
scenes. I sympathize with every attempt to clear 
up and verify its minutest details, with the labors 
of all critics and archeologists devoted to this end. 


IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. 341 


I rejoice in all topographical adjustments and illus- 
trations; in all that local researches, following in 
the steps of “those blessed feet,’ have gleaned 
from the soil of Palestine. But all this is impor- 
tant only as it draws its inspiration from and 
leads my aspiration to the ideal Christ, “the same 
yesterday, to-day, and for ever.” Dissociated from 
this idea, the acres of Palestine are as barren as 
any which the ebbing of a nation’s life has left 
desolate. 


XUI. 


INCARNATION AND TRANSUBSTAN-— 
TIATION. 


AD we no other record than that which the 
first three Gospels present of the sayings 
and doings of Jesus, the Christian religion would 
never have taken the form which it did in the 
teaching and creed of the Church. Whoever com- 
pares the fourth Gospel with the other three per- 
ceives a wide difference, not to say conflict, between 
the Jesus depicted by Matthew, Mark, and Luke, 
and the Christ portrayed by John. The difference 
appears in the acts recorded, and is still more con- 
spicuous in the sayings ascribed to him. In their 
view of the Messiah, the first three evangelists — 
the so-called ‘‘synoptics”—are substantially one. 
Their record may be termed the Jews’ Gospel; that 
of John the Greek. 

The vexed question of authorship I shall not 
discuss. Whether written by John, the son of 
Zebedee, or by whomsoever written, it is very 
un-Jewish, and even anti-Jewish, in its spirit and 
aim. 


INCARNATION, ETC. 343 


The Jews’ Gospel sees in Jesus simply the Jew- 
ish Messiah, the destined king of the Jewish people, 
having an hereditary claim to the national throne, 
—a claim which it seeks to establish by geneal- 
ogies tracing his descent from David and Abraham. 
The Greek Gospel, on the contrary, cares nothing 
for the royal lineage and nothing for the Jewish 
throne. It has nothing to say of the human an- 
cestry of Jesus, but leaps at once to his spiritual 
pedigree, in virtue of which he overtops Moses and 
out-dates Abraham. Its Christ is the Word made 
flesh. The Jews’ Gospel presents its subject on 
the natural, national, human side; the Greek Gos- 
pel propounds a Christ who is superhuman and 
divine. 

Here is a difference, which is very profound, 
between the first three Gospels and that of John; 
and one which involves a fundamental difference 
of race, —a difference which reaches down to the 
very roots of the human world. It takes us back 
to Shem and Japhet, the ancestors respectively, 
according to Biblical tradition, of two races whose 
mental characteristics and religious proclivities are 
widely distinct. “Semitic” and ‘ Japhetic ” rep- 
resent two types of mind which differ generally in 
their intellectual manifestations, and more espe- 
cially in their theology. They have given birth 
respectively to two distinct classes or lines of re- 


344 INCARNATION 


ligions, whose beginnings are as old as history, and 
some of whose progeny remain to this day. 

Judaism and Mohammedanism are the offspring 
of Shem; the Greek mythology, long since extinct, 
and Brahmanism and Buddhism, which still sur- 
vive, are the progeny of Japhet. 


Now, the chief characteristic of Semitic theology, 
as it seems to me, is not monotheism, as Renan and 
others have stated; for some of the Semitic nations 
— the Phenicians, for example — have been poly- 
theists ; not the belief in one God, but the wide sep- 
aration between God and man, the absence of any 
doctrine of incarnation. ‘The Jewish mind, for ex- 
ample, knew no mediation between God and man 
but that of the prophet’s word or the priest’s aton- 
ing sacrifice. In the Jewish religion—and the 
same is true of the Mohammedan, its offspring — 
there is a gulf between God and man, not a con- 
sequence of sin, but inherent in the nature of 
Godhead, and which no atonement can do away. 
Jehovah is a being apart, uncommunicating, incom- 
municable. He sends his messengers abroad to 
make known and execute his will, but he himself 
inhabits the high and holy place, and never quits 
his local throne. His word goes forth, it comes to 
this or that individual; but never becomes man, 
never incarnates itself in a human person. The 


AND TRANSUBSTANTIATION. 345 


greatest of prophets is still but a prophet, nothing 
more. The Jewish Church never dreamed of deify- 
ing Moses, Islam never dreamed of deifying Mo- 
hammed, as the Christian Church has deified 
Christ. The fundamental principles of both re- 
ligions forbid such deification. But when we turn 
to the religions of that other great division of the 
human race, the Japhetic, we encounter an entirely 
different conception of Godhead. Here deification 
and incarnation are familiar and ruling ideas. In 
the elder of the Hindoo religions we encounter a 
series of successive incarnations, of which the tenth 
and last is yet to come. In the younger faith of 
Buddhism we encounter a succession of deifica- 
tions, — the Buddhist knowing no God but one who 
was first man, and, having become God, has again 
and again descended into humanity for the salva- 
tion of men. In the religion of the Greeks, the 
most cultivated nation of antiquity, we find gods 
and men conversing on easy and familiar terms, — 
Deity taking often a human form, mortals often 
raised to the rank of gods. 

This fundamental difference of religious tendency 
in the two races, — the tendency, on the one hand, 
to separate God from man by an infinite distance 
not only of degree but of kind, and the tendency, 
on the other, to view them as distinguished only by 
degree, and as being in possible, close communion 


846 INCARNATION 


with each other, — this fundamental difference is 
reflected in the New Testament. The Jews’ Gos- 
pel, comprising Matthew, Mark, and Luke, rep- 
resents the former tendency; the fourth Gospel, 
bearing the name of John, represents the latter. 
And thus the difference, which even the superficial 
reader must notice between these two portions of 
the New Testament, has its origin in the deepest 
roots of human history. The fact to me is one of 
intense significance, proof, and illustration of the 
universality of adaptation, the reconciling spirit, 
the world-embracing scope, of the gospel of Christ. 
When Paul said that in Christ there is neither Jew 
nor Greek, he spoke with reference to the disregard 
of nationality and the equal acceptance with God, 
in the Christian view, of all the kindreds and tribes 
of men. But the saying is true in another and 
wider sense. In Christ —that is, in Christianity — 
there is neither Jew nor Greek, because both are 
merged in a third and new creation. In other 
words, Christianity is a reconciliation and compro- 
mise between the Jewish and the Greek religion, be- 
tween polytheism and monotheism, correcting the 
looseness of the one and moderating the stiffness 
of the other. 

In accordance with this view, we have in the 
first three Gospels the Jewish conception of Christ 


1 “Tf any man be in Christ, he is a new creature.” 


AND TRANSUBSTANTIATION. 347 


as the national Messiah; no suggestion, no hint, of 
any doctrine of incarnation, no hint of what may 
be called the divine humanity, the union of God 
and man in Christ. The fourth Gospel, which, if 
written by a Jew, was written under Greek in- 
fluences and for Greeks, abounds in hints to that 
effect. Of these, the most noticeable are the state- 
ment at the start that the Word which was in the 
beginning, and which was God, was made flesh in 
Jesus Christ; and the statement in the sixth chap- 
ter that the flesh of Christ is the life of the world, 
which, unless his disciples eat, they have no life in 
them. From these two statements the Christian 
Church in past ages developed two doctrines which 
are closely related the one with the other, and 
which constitute the two focal points in the Roman 
Catholic system of faith: first, the identity in sub- 
stance of Christ with God,—#in other words, the 
incarnation of God in Christ; second, the doctrine 
of the “real presence”’ of Christ in the bread of the 
Lord’s Supper when consecrated by the priest, com- 
monly known as the doctrine of transubstantiation. 
These are not doctrines of the New Testament, 
but the passages I have cited from the Gospel of 
John furnished the suggestions on which they are 
founded. It took three centuries to bring out the 
one, and seven centuries more to fix and complete 
the other. Most Protestant Christians, with some 


348 INCARNATION 


inconsistency, reject the latter while retaining the 
former; reject transubstantiation while retaining 
the doctrine of incarnation, that is, of the deity of 
Christ. With some inconsistency, I say, because 
they are closely related. The theological motive, 
the underlying principle, in both is the same. In 
both, the interior sense is the union of the human 
and divine, the principle that God is in real con- 
tact with human nature, and that only through that 
contact is man redeemed from the power of sin and 
death and made partaker of eternal life. Let us 
look at both doctrines in the light of this idea. 


I. Incarnation,—God taking a human form in 
Christ. There is no trace of this doctrine in the 
first century. The Christians of the first century 
were strict monotheists,— Unitarians. They spec- 
ulated very little, if at all, about the person of 
Christ. The facts of his history were too near to 
allow of such speculation. No mystic theory that 
might arise could compete with the recent impres- 
sion which those facts had left in the mind. Here 
was the story of a man who had lived and died like 
other men, distinguished only by his moral eleva- 
tion, his wonder-working power, and his martyr- 
death. Jewish converts still looked upon him, 
through the medium of their Messianic idea, as the 
national Messiah who would re-appear as earthly 


AND TRANSUBSTANTIATION. 849 


potentate and establish his throne in Jerusalem. 
Gentile Christians were content to see in him a 
teacher of saving truths, a deliverer from the errors 
of polytheism, from the bondage of superstition and 
sin, —the authoritative witness of the doctrine of 
one God and of the resurrection. 

But when the historical Christ had receded into 
the distance of a by-gone age; when his image, as 
an actual person, had grown dim, and the tenden- 
eies of the Gentile mind, especially the tendency to 
deify illustrious and extraordinary men, had begun 
to react on the simplicity of the gospel, — Christian 
faith, no longer satisfied with bare historic fact, 
idealized the person of Christ, exalted him above 
earthly limitations into something superhuman and 
divine; and here and there went so far as to make 
him pure spirit, assuming the likeness of man but 
divested of all natural belongings, without flesh 
and blood, a divine apparition. Then came the 
doctrine of the Word, the personified Wisdom, in 
Jewish phrase “the first begotten Son of God,” 
whom a portion of the Church, in accordance with 
the Gospel of John, supposed to have been united 
to the man Jesus, and to have constituted the true 
Christ. To these two influences, the deifying ten- 
dency and the doctrine of the Word, must be 
added a third. That third and most influential 
factor in the doctrine of the incarnation, as finally 


550 INCARNATION 


shaped by the Church, was the view entertained of 
man’s redemption. The mission of the gospel was 
understood to be the redemption of human nature, 
and the reconciliation or reunion of man with God, 
in whose image he was formed. This redemption, 
it was maintained, could be accomplished only by 
actual communication and contact of God with - 
man. This contact, it was therefore urged, must 
be supposed to have taken place in the person of 
Christ, —the divine and the human uniting in him. 
Accordingly, the Word incarnated in Jesus must 
be regarded as partaking of the nature or substance 
of Deity; not, as the Arians taught, a created 
being, however remote and antecedent to all other 
finite existence that creation might be conceived, 
but uncreated, without beginning of existence, 
born of God from eternity, and therefore one with 
God in substance, — “ consubstantial.” The Son 
consubstantial with the Father, — this was the doc- 
trine of Athanasius, and the Council of Nicza, 
where this point was decided. 


The superficial mind is apt to regard these ques- 
tions, which then agitated the Church and the 
world, as empty abstractions, senseless quibbles. 
But the union of God with man is no quibble; it is 
a truth of profound significance; and the Council 
of Niczea which declared it is one of the most im- 


AND TRANSUBSTANTIATION. 3851 


portant assemblies that was ever convened on this 
earth: it dates a new era in the history of human 
thought. God in actual contact with man— God 
in man and man in God—is the underlying idea 
of the Athanasian dogma which asserts that the 
Son is consubstantial with the Father. Probably, 
Athanasius did not perceive the real drift and 
scope of his doctrine. It was only of the person 
of Christ that he affirmed substantial community 
with God. Christ united in his person two natures, 
the human and the divine ; and, by this union of 
God with man in the person of Christ, human 
nature is redeemed and restored to health and 
God. This was the substance of his theology. 
He did not show, nor does it appear, how human- 
ity in general is benefited by this exceptional par- 
ticipation of the divine nature. Of what avail to 
mankind at large that a single individual, of the 
countless millions who in all the ages of human 
history have walked the earth, was substantially 
united to God, if all the rest are substantially sep- 
arated from him? Athanasius maintained, against 
some of his contemporaries, the real humanity of 
Christ. But if Christ was really man, he differed 
from other men only in degree. What he by nature 
possessed without measure, all men in a measure 
must also possess. This, Athanasius, from want 
of thoroughness, failed to perceive; or, from want 


852 INCARNATION 


of consistency, failed to admit. This was his doc- 
trinal limitation and defect. The fault of the 
Trinitarian doctrine, so far as this point is con- 
cerned, is not what it teaches, but what it omits to 
teach. It is not the assertion of divinity in Christ, 
but the limitation of divine humanity to him, the 
implied exclusion of the rest of mankind from any 
part or lot in this matter. In the view of the Trin- 
itarian doctrine, mankind at large are separated 
from Christ, not only in degree, but in kind; they 
have not that oneness with him which he himself 
accorded to them in his prayer, “That they all 
may be one; as Thou, Father, art in me and I in 
Thee, that they may be one in us.” They have 
not that part in God which one of the New Tes- 
tament writers affirms of Christians at least, — 
_ Called to be partakers of the divine nature.” 


II. To remedy this defect, to assure to believers 
that participation of the Godhead, without which, 
it was maintained, there is no salvation, was the 
meaning and purpose of the doctrine of transub- 
stantiation. According to this doctrine, the bread 
of the Christian ordinance of the Supper, when 
consecrated by the priest, is converted into the 
body of Christ, whereby they who partake of it 
are substantially, and, as it were, bodily, united to 
Christ and to God. Transubstantiation, as I said, 


AND TRANSUBSTANTIATION. 353 


is closely connected with, and a logical supplement 
to, incarnation. 

Both of these doctrines, in the form in which 
they are held and maintained by the larger por- 
tions of the Church, are repudiated by rationalizing 
Christians, as opposed to reason and common sense. 
But in both of them there is an element of truth 
which, stripped of its doctrinal embodiment, is 
worth considering, and which most of us, I think, 
will heartily accept. To say that God incarnated 
himself in a single individual of all the multitude 
of the human family ; that once, and once only, in 
all the ages of time he manifested himself in a 
human person,—is a proposition which cannot 
satisfy, if it does not shock, the unprejudiced 
mind. But expand the proposition; say that God 
is manifest (and that is the only logical sense in 
which we can speak of incarnation), — that God is 
manifest in every inspired teacher and prophet of 
truth and righteousness, in every holy, self-sacri- 
ficing life, in every martyr who, living or dying, 
devotes himself to any great and worthy cause, — 
manifest in all in whom love of truth or love of 
God and man is the ruling motive and principle of 
action; say, with Paul, that all “who are led by 
the Spirit of God are sons of God” in precisely the 
sense, if not in the degree, in which Jesus was the 
Son of God; that the real distinction and peculiar- 

23 


304 INCARNATION 


ity of Christ was not an exceptional, but a sub- 
limely typical, nature and life ; not that he was the 
only God-man, but the type of the God-man, in all 
generations, —say this, and you assert what no un- 
prejudiced thinker and no philosophic student of 
religion will deny. And this I believe to be the 
real interior truth of the Athanasian doctrine, al- 
beit Athanasius himself may not have seized it in 
its fulness, as certainly he did not unfold it in his 
teaching. 

So, likewise, the doctrine of transubstantiation, 
in its gross and literal sense the most monstrous 
that was ever propounded by any religion, has yet 
its true side. Strip it of the technicalities and sen- 
suous imagery with which it has been associated by 
the Church of Rome, and it means that the conse- 
crating action of faith transmutes the material into 
the spiritual; discerns a spiritual presence and finds 
epiritual nourishment in material things. It means 
the participation and assimilation of the spirit of 
Christ, symbolized by the eating of the bread which 
he called his body. Christ told his people, “ Except 
ye eat of the flesh of the Son of Man ye have no 
life abiding in you.” It was a daring figure which 
the Church understood in a coarse and literal way, 
and of which the doctrine in question was the prac- 
tical interpretation. Let us understand by it the 
application of Christian truth to the present earthly 


AND TRANSUBSTANTIATION. 355 


life. Christianity requires the flesh of the Son of 
Man; that is, a visible world, in which the spirit of 
the Son of Man, a divine spirit, shall embody itself. 
And this idea, amid all the superstitions and mon- 
strous perversions which gathered around it, is 
dimly shadowed forth in the Roman Church dogma 
of transubstantiation. Bread, which forms so im- 
portant a part of this “flesh” or visible world, may 
be regarded as symbolizing the whole. The con- 
secrated wafer, which Romish superstition con- 
ceives to be bread converted into Deity by the 
word of a priest, may be taken to represent the 
looked-for universal transformation of this human 
world by the communication of a higher and 
divine life. 


Such meaning I discern in the doctrines dis- 
cussed, and accept them in this sense. I believe 
in the ever-proceeding incarnation of the spirit of 
God in human life. I believe in the ever-proceed- 
ing transubstantiation of the world into the simili- 
tude of the divine idea. The Trinitarian doctrine 
was a crude attempt to formulate these truths, 
but instead of their exponent became their grave. 
Trinitarian theology has lost its hold of advancing 
Christian thought; but the thing it embodied, 
divine humanity, across all the mists of theology 
is struggling into light, is struggling into practi- 


7 


356 INCARNATION, ETC. 


cal self-demonstration across all the atrocities and 
woes of time. Side by side with the horrors of 
carnage and the desolations of war, it bids the 
eternal charities bloom. It accompanies the march 
of devastating hosts with the sacred band of self- 
elected comforters, whose service no softness shuns 
and no danger dismays. It summons the civilized 
world to minister to the wants and woes of coun- 
tries laid waste by famine or fire. It challenges 
science to show how ancient wrongs may be abated, 
and the life of man in society be made more beau- 
tiful and safe. 

Thus, practical Christianity fulfils the truth that 
was hidden in the obsolete dogmas of the Church; 
and thus, where “the letter killeth, the spirit 
maketh alive.” 


XIV. 
THE HUMAN SOUL. 
ITS ORIGIN AND DESTINATION. 


Ov being is deeper than we know; it under- 

grounds all conscious experience. This is 
true of all being, not excepting perhaps the Divine. 
Certainly, no finite consciousness reaches to the 
root from which it sprang. Scarcely in God can 
consciousness be coeval and co-ordinate with life. 
Divine consciousness may know, but does it bear, 
its own root?! All conscious being springs from a 
root unknown. Of all life the origin is lost to 
itself in blank unconsciousness. We reach back 
with our recollection and find no beginning of ex- 
istence. Who of us knows any thing except by 





1 Schelling, the most profound of the Transcendentalists, in 
whose writings Mr. Stirling, would he know the true “Secret of 
Hegel,” should look for the root of his subject, says: ‘‘ God him- 
self, in order to be, requires a ground [of existence]; only, that 
this ground is not outside of him, but in him. He has in himself a 
nature, which, although belonging to him is yet distinct from him.” 
(Schelling’s Werke, Erste Abth, 7ter Bd. p. 375.) Did Schelling 
borrow from Jacob Boehme, whose “ First Principle” is unintelli- 
gent, although the Father of Intelligence, not God but the Source - 
of God? 


308 THE SOUL. 


report of the first two years of earthly life? Who 
remembers the time when he first said “IJ,” or 
thought “I”? We began to exist for others before 
we began to exist for ourselves. Our experience 
is not co-extensive with our being, our memory 
does not comprehend it. We bear not the root, 
but the root us. 

What is that root? Wecallit soul. Our soul, 
we call it: properly speaking it is not ours, but we 
are its. It is not a part of us, but we are a part of 
it. It is not one article in an inventory of articles 
which together make up our individuality, but the 
root of that individuality. It is larger than we are 
and older than we are, —that is, than our conscious 
self. The conscious self does not begin until some 
time. after the birth of the individual. It is not 
aboriginal, but a product,—as it were, the blossom- 
ing of an individuality. We may suppose countless 
souls which never bear this product, which never 
blossom into self. And the soul which does so 
blossom exists before that blossom unfolds. 

How long before, it is impossible to say ; whether 
the birth, for example, of a human individual is the 
soul’s beginning to be; whether a new soul is fur- 
nished to each new body, or the hody given to a 
pre-existing soul. It is a question on which the- 
ology throws no light, and which psychology but 
faintly illustrates. But so far as that faint illustra- 


THE SOUL. 359 


tion reaches, it favors the supposition of pre-exist- 
ence. That supposition seems best to match the 
supposed continued existence of the soul hereafter. 
Whatever had a beginning in time, it should seem, 
must end in time. The eternal destination which 
faith ascribes to the soul presupposes an eternal 
origin. On the other hand, if the pre-existence of 
the soul were assured it would carry the assurance 
of immortality. 

An obvious objection, and one often urged against 
this hypothesis, is the absence of any recollection of 
a previous life. If the soul existed before its union 
with this present organization, why does it never 
recall any circumstance, scene, or experience of its 
former state? There have been those who pro- 
fessed to remember a past existence ; but without 
regarding those pretended reminiscences, or re- 
garding them only as illusions, I answer that the 
previous existence may not have been a conscious 
existence. In that case there would have been no 
recorded experience, and consequently nothing to 
recall. But suppose a conscious existence antece- 
dent to the present, the soul could not preserve the 
- record of a former organization. The new organ- 
ization with its new entries must necessarily efface 
the record of the old. For memory depends on 
continuity of association. When the thread of that 
continuity is broken, the knowledge of the past is 


360 THE SOUL. 


gone. If, in a state of unconsciousness, one were 
taken entirely out of his present surroundings; if, 
falling asleep in one set of circumstances, like 
Christopher Sly in the play, he were to wake in 
another, were to wake to entirely new conditions; 
especially, if during that sleep his body were to 
undergo a change,— he would lose on waking all 
knowledge of his former life for want of a connect- 
ing link between it and the new. And this, 
according to the supposition, is precisely what has 
happened to the soul at birth. The birth into the 
present was the death of the old, — “a sleep and a 
forgetting.” The soul went to sleep in one body, 
it woke inanew. The sleep is a gulf of oblivion 
between the two. 

And a happy thing, if the soul pre-existed, it is 
for us that we remember nothing of its former life. 
The memory of a past existence would be a drag on 
the present, engrossing our attention much to the 
prejudice of this life’s interests and claims. The 
backward-looking soul would dwell in the past in- 
stead of the present, and miss the best uses of life. 

But though on the supposition of a former exist- 
ence the soul would not be likely to preserve 
the record of that existence, it would neverthe- 
less retain the effect. It would not, on assuming 
its present conditions, be as though it had never 
before been. Its past experiences would essen- 


THE SOUL. ~ 361 


tially modify it; it would take a character from 
its former state. If a moral and intelligent being, 
it would bring into the world of its present des- 
tination certain tendencies and dispositions, the 
growth of a previous life. And thus the moral 
law and the moral nature of the soul would assert 
themselves with retributions transcending the limits 
of a single existence, and reaching on from life to 
life of the pilgrim soul. 

It is commonly conceded that there are native 
differences of character in men,— different pro- 
pensities, tempers, not wholly explained by differ- 
ence of circumstance or education. They show 
themselves where circumstance and education have 
been the same; they seem to be innate. These 
are sometimes ascribed to organization. But or- 
ganization is not final. That, again, requires to 
be explained. According to my thinking, it is 
the soul that makes organization, not organiza- 
tion the soul. The supposition of a previous ex- 
istence would best explain these differences as 
something carried over from life to life, —the har- 
vest of seed that was sown in other states, and 
whose fruit remains, although the sowing is re- 
membered no more. 

This was the theory of the most learned and 
acute of the Christian Fathers,! and, though never 


1 Origen. 


362 THE SOUL. 


adopted or sanctioned by the Church, has been 
occasionally revived in later time. Of all the 
theories respecting the origin of the soul it seems 
to me the most plausible, and therefore the one 
most likely to throw light on the question of a 
life to come. It is easy to speculate about the 
hereafter, but most of the speculations on this 
topic have no fixed data, no authorized assump- 
tion on which to rest. They lack the first and 
most essential condition of a rational theory of 
future life,—to wit, a distinct conception of the 
nature of the soul, what it is that survives the 
event of death, what it is of which we predicate 
immortality. This should be the starting point in 
all our reasonings in this direction. Painting an 
imaginary heaven is an innocent enough enter- 
tainment of the fancy, but, as to any correspond- 
ing reality or probability, it is worth just as much 
as any other day-dream or castle in the air. A 
pleasant picture, nothing more. 

What is it that survives the decease of this 
mortal? It is that from which this mortal life 
sprang, —its root, the soul. We are apt to faney 
that we bear the root, not the root us. What we 
call “I”? is not the origin, but a product of the 
soul,—a phase or mode of its present life. The 
soul was prior to the conscious self; it is the root 
or seed from which the conscious self has grown. 


ee 


THE SOUL. 363 


The future life, like the present, must spring from 
that root; and in endeavoring to construct a theory 
of that life the rational method is to follow the 
- analogy of this. According to that analogy, the 
future life, like the present, will begin with in- 
fancy. The soul will wake from the sleep of death 
an infant child. A period of infantile unconscious- 
ness will precede the development of conscious life. 
Gradually the new-born self will unfold and find 
and fill its appointed sphere. 

Opposed to this view is the current opinion which 
supposes that souls are translated at once by death 
from a state of earthly imperfection to that region 
of spiritual life which is commonly understood by the 
term “heaven.” A preposterous idea of human des- 
tiny! The purgatory of the Church of Rome is a less 
irrational conception of the future of the soul. The 
purgatory of the Church of Rome, indefensible as 
it is in the gross material form in which it has been 
held in time past, respects at least the moral con- 
ditions which, in every state, must shape the life of 
rational souls. The fact is that in Protestant com- 
munions, since the passing away of the old beliefs, 
the sentiments rather than the understanding have 
had the fashioning of the popular theories of the 
life to come. Very sentimental those theories are, 
and very regardless of the facts and probabilities of 
human nature. The fundamental error which per- 


864 THE SOUL. 


*” 


vades them is the notion of a state of unchangeable 
felicity, into which the soul is supposed to enter 
with full consciousness immediately after the body’s 
death. The very word “heaven,” in this view, is 
misleading. I hold to the analogies of the present 
life. I hold to what we know, or may rationally 
surmise, of the nature of the soul. Above all, I 
hold to the moral conditions which must govern 
the future as they governed the past of moral 
natures. Whatever of moral growth has been at- 
tained will tell on the future consciousness; and 
whatever of moral evil has been contracted will 
also tell. If the soul in this mortal, by will and 
endeavor, has laid hold of the divine, that divine 
when new bodied will put forth new and finer 
growths, and glorify itself with achievements which 
here perhaps were meditated but could not be re- 
alized. And if, on the other hand, through weak- 
ness or blindness or adverse fate, that better life 
has not been attained, its germ is still there, in- 
eradicably there, and may under new conditions be 
brought to bloom. So long as the soul is a con- 
scious rational force in the universe of things, the 
possibility will remain to it of the heavenly life. 
Somewhere or other in the boundless all, at some 
point or other of endless time, the good the soul 
seeks it will surely find. So long as it faithfully 
strives, its growth is sure, and if ever it can 


THE SOUL. 365 


cease to strive, if ever it can cease to see and seek 
the good, then, as a conscious thing, it will cease 
to be. 

Of the “spiritual,” disembodied state, which by 
some is supposed to succeed this present, I can form 
no conception. A new and bodily organism I hold 
to be an essential part of the soul’s destination. 
Whether the soul in that new organization will re- 
tain the memories which belong to this, is a ques- 
tion I am well content to leave as I find it, involved 
in impenetrable night. I cannot feel it to be essen- 
tial to the question of immortality. I cannot feel 
that the fact of identity is involved in that of mem- 
ory, that the soul which does not identify its being 
with a foregone existence is no longer the same. 
The soul is the same; but what it produces, the 
conscious life that springs from that root, is not the 
same. The former life has left traces which re- 
main, which essentially modify the soul. Those 
traces, those modifications, are important; but that 
the acts and experiences which have wrought them 
should be recalled, that the soul should be able to 
recount to itself the story of its past existences, — 
appears to me a matter of little moment. If the 
health and growth of the moral nature require 
those memories, they will be vouchsafed ; and that 
is all we can venture to prophesy about it. 

Another question immediately connected with 


366 THE SOUL. 


the memory of a former existemce is one which 
affection persistently asks of all the oracles, — 
whether dear friends who were parted by death 
shall meet again. To this the answer is still the 
same: if the soul’s well-being requires it, Heaven 
will grant it. If when the soul wakes to new ex- 
istence it shall find in itself distinct impressions of 
a previous life, and among those impressions the 
image of any dear friend who has gone before, and 
shall long to recover the object of that affection, to 
bind again what death had severed; and if the 
friend so sought shall also experience a like remi- 
niscence and reciprocal longings, — then I can sup- 
pose that the two, thus mutually drawn, shall find 
one another and renew their bond. I can suppose 
that love stronger than death may revoke the sep- 
aration of death, and give like to like. Souls that 
belong to each other by all their affinities and all 
their yearnings, one would say, must sooner or 
later unite. And yet it is equally supposable, and 
I confess in my view more likely, that the coming 
together of the two so inclined shall be without 
recognition of identity and without recollection of 
foregone union. Who knows if the love which in 
this world draws with mutual and irresistible at- 
traction two kindred and predestined hearts, be 
not an unconscious renewal of an old pre-natal 
bond ? 


os 


THE SOUL. 361 


But these are matters we may trustingly leave — 
where indeed, whether trustingly or not, we must 
leave them — with the infinite Love which embraces 
all our loves, and the infinite Wisdom which com- 
prehends all our needs; assured that the Father of 
the house whose mansions are many, and the Father 
of spirits whose goal is one, will find the right place 
and connections and nurture for every soul he has 
caused to be ; that in the eternities the thing desired 
will arrive at last; that seeking and finding are 
divinely evened. Let us rest in the thought that 
life must be richer than all our experience, nay, 
than our fondest dream. 


THE END. 

















TT 


